02-02-12
I received my order from Digikey in an extraordinarily large box. It turns out that if you order heat shrink tubing (or probably anything long) they won't try to coil it.
I soldered several pieces of header onto a few of the components I've received to ease in prototyping. The tiny wires of the piezo were hard to solder!
I've yet again become a huge fan of heatshrink tubing though the 1/16" interior diameter stuff I just bought is too small for most of my purposes.
I attempted to use one of the transistors I bought as a switch but I fear it's doing something weird. I need diodes so I don't mess up my arduino board. I tried to drive a 12v ticker counter with it but I think I'm doing something not quite right. I think maybe the transistor might not be able to handle as much current as I'm trying to drive through it.
I've been looking around quite a bit at various means of sensory substitution and I found
this site which seems to have a bunch of examples of how to work with multiple vibration motors (my possible next project if all goes well).
And yes, I really need to start figuring how exactly I'm going to make these little light/sound/motion sensing bots.
