LittleBits - Learning Electronics Easily

LittleBits is a new startup that offers a very interesting but yet simply and easy method to learn electronics. Unlike Squishy Circuit which really get your hand dirty, your hands would be really clean with LittleBits, if you choose so.

See the introduction video:


Founder of LittleBits, Ayah Bdeir presenting at TED:
With Starter Kit priced at US$89, it is consider quite expensive for many countries. That's ~RM280. Wow. Additional components cost from US$8 to US$20 each, this easily cost up to more than 1k Malaysia Ringgit. Sigh. Could you please reduce the price please? More demo of LittleBits: Visit their website for more detail: http://littlebits.cc Like this if you are FB user and you think this post is useful. The button is at top right of content of this post. +1 this post if you are Google+ users and you think this post is useful. Hope you will enjoy this post, subscribe to my RSS or mailing list or follow me on blogger or twitter. :)
source: internet!

Teach your children electric or electronics

How do you teach children about electric or electronics? By using broadboard like this?

Pix source: Wikipedia

Only if they are more grown up right? What if you want to teach 3 or 5 years old about electric or electronics? Using breadboard is not really a good choice because breadboard is small and not easy to use. Even sometime myself also find it difficult to plug in some components into breadboard.

So how about using some material that can be find at home and make learning electronics a fun stuff?

Squishy circuits are a project from Thomas Lab at University of St. Thomas. Here is the TED video of the demonstration of Squishy circuit:


This is how to make a conductive dough:


This is how to make a insulating dough:


This is how to play squishy circuits with young children:


Visit Squishy Circuits official website for more detail:
http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/

Here are 2 posts on how to dowload TED video:
http://outdatedpenanguncle.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-download-ted-videos.html
http://outdatedpenanguncle.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-download-ted-videos-ii.html

Hope you will enjoy this post, subscribe to my RSS or mailing list or follow me on blogger or twitter. :)
source: video from TED and youtube and squishy circuit

Still remember the resistor color code?

I bought a power adapter last month to power an air ionizer. This air ionizer was used on mum's old car, now the car mainly sit still. So I figure if I could use the ionizer in my room, I can save some money not to buy a new air ionizer. I bought the power adapter from a HongKong online shop.

This is the power adapter I bought:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15646

Unfortunately, as expected the quality of this power adapter not so good, after a week or two, it stop functioning. Opening it up and the only thing that does not looks right is a resistor that has part of it's skin come out. I think that should be the one that got burned. So my next step is to replace the resistor, but somehow I couldn't remember this resistor color code that I was so proud of during uni time.
So go to google:
http://www.google.com.my/images?q=resistor+color+code

Going to buy that resistor and fix that power adaptor. But I still have the old soldering iron to dig out, it should be somewhere in the house, but just couldn't remember where is it......


See also the google ads for superbowl:
http://ahsiangboringdiary.blogspot.com/2010/02/super-bowl-commercial-that-i-like.html