Geekspace for Women

Posted by ubergeeke on July 11th, 2008 in blogpost

A few days ago, I told y’all about my tech plans for the near future.

This particular project is one that I’m sissy-baiting myself into finishing. A few weeks ago, while I was on vacation with family, my sister-in-law (an artist) dedicated a great deal of time finishing a small project that she said had been on her to-do list for an extended period of time. She said that she probably wouldn’t even keep the results - she just wanted it done. It got me to thinking about some of the projects on my workbench.

There are other things I’m involved in that are significantly more technical, but this one has been gathering dust on my workbench while I got distracted by amateur rockets, microcontrollers, scripting, etc., and I want it gone. I’ve given myself until the end of this month to get it done (20 days and counting).

In other words, this is basically an exercise in just finishing something I started.

I bought this Amerikit from Fry’s. It’s listed on the Elenco site as a Deluxe Electronics Kit, and it looks like it’s one of the introductory kits on the price list. What I like about the kit is that it assumes the buyer knows absolutely nothing about electronics. Its original target market was young teens interested in electronics, but I got it anyway. (Mind you, this was before I started messing around with some of the EE curriculum I’ve been dealing with over the last few years, so don’t point and laugh *too* hard.)

I’ve already started the assembly by soldering a few of the capacitors to the board, since the packets for the resistors, opamps and transistors are still unopened (as you can see from the photos), I didn’t get very far.

Next week, I’ll post a progress report to keep me honest!