Breadboards are Delicious

Isn’t it beautiful?

It's my favorite time! Breadboard time! Mmmm, nothing like the smell of sweet silicon and ceramics in the evening!

Some components for my project require 3.3 Volts, and a quick stop at Radio Shack scored me a variable voltage regulator. Sweet, I thought, this will be easy!

How wrong I was. Apparently I am a little rusty! You only have to place a few resistors between pins of the regulator to set the output voltage, but my quick scan through the specification for the relevant equation missed an important note about the theory! My resistors were too big. I browned out my regulator and I spent a lot more time than I wanted to debugging what should have been a five minute circuit...and I loved every minute of it! My current job has me designing computers using computers. It is super nice to pull my eyes away from a screen and get some hands-on time with the little bits and pieces that make everything go.

It's nice to have a website to document all the baby steps of a project. I did the same thing for MAL-9000, my guitar robot. You can see pretty baby pictures on Google+.