electronics

[pretentious]

anyone here interested in electronics? I've been doing a bit of playing around with soldering and testing the resistance of everything i can get my hands on, with a multimeter haha. My goal is to some extent bridge the software/hardware gap though i'm starting out and will probably soon enough be overwhelmed by what that actually means
Anyone else played around with this stuff

[Drizna]

IF you feel like exchanging ASCII arrays, let me know
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
Damn kid.

"And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those damn kids." Sorry had to do a Scooby reference there.

You know I have always wanted to mess with soldering components together, but was afraid that I would end up soldering my fingers together instead.

[pretentious]

IF you feel like exchanging ASCII arrays, let me know
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
Damn kid.

"And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those damn kids." Sorry had to do a Scooby reference there.

You know I have always wanted to mess with soldering components together, but was afraid that I would end up soldering my fingers together instead.

Some parts hot and you have to respect that, but for the most part I don't take any obsessive safety precautions and havn't done any mortal damage damage to myself yet

[Drizna]

Cool, so what you are telling me is I am paranoid. I accept that.

Also at first I thought your title said Poser, not poster. Stupid 23" monitor making small text.

[pretentious]

Cool, so what you are telling me is I am paranoid. I accept that.

the paranoid survive
According to a quick wikipedia search, solder has a melting point of 90 to 450 °C (190 to 840 °F)
for small stuff that i've been messing with, i'd assume it's at the lower end of that, it also seems to cool down quickely and there isn't much of it being used at one time so you should be pretty safe. The iron is the part that you should be careful of because there is a fare bit of surface erea being hot.

Also at first I thought your title said Poser, not poster. Stupid 23" monitor making small text.

yeah i think that's after 100 posts the description changes

[WallShadow]

I've lately been toying with electronics, taking apart anything i can get my hands on. You can find some very interesting things inside every day objects. I have an array of electrical components and chips i wish to someday find a use for. As for safety, the only thing i really fear is charged capacitors. Anyone actually know a safe way of decharging them? I've heard of connecting the two wires on them to short it out, of taking a grounding wire and touching it, and the simple fact that anything having less than a joule inside of it is generally safe, but still.

[weekend hacker]

As a general rule, never mess with stuff thats plugged in and yeah, short the caps before touching anything. Some devices like old tv's or even power supplies can hold a charge big enough to kill you for several months after being unplugged.
As for soldering, I've burned myself countless times but its really not that big of a deal. If something hurts stop touching it and you'll probably avoid permanent damage.
I'm currently studying electronics since I have no idea about most of the calculations etc involved and I can tell you its a lot of fun
As for bridging the software and hardware gap.. look into microcontrollers(AVR's are cheap), or even an arduino(which is a simple board with a microcontroller that does almost everything for you so you can focus on experimentation).
There is so much you can do with just some transistors and a microcontroller(robots!) that doesn't involve any complex calculations like you'd use for converting a signals etc.