# Books for Beginning Electronics



## SelcSilverhand (Aug 5, 2009)

Hello all,

I've had a bit of good fortune lately. The school I work for was moving buildings and they uncovered a large amount of electronic parts that were going to be scrapped. I claimed them from the trash and ended up with a stockpile of equipment. Resistors, capacitors, LED's, IC's, a parrallex programmer and chip, powered breadboards/training pads, multimeters, and even a decent oscilloscope. I'm set on parts, now I just need to figure out what to build with it all! 

I've got a developing interest in animatronics and I'm looking for more information. I've been checking out a lot of halloween sites and have found good info so far. Now I'm looking for good reading material that covers some of the basics of mechanical movement and electronics. I've got the basics of resistors, caps, pos and neg current, and others but now I'm looking for explanations of other components such as NAND/NOR gates, high/low signals, oscilators, diodes, etc. 

I picked up "Animatronics: A Guide to Holiday Displays", the Halloween2go dvd, and a few others here and there so far. I'm eyeing the Blue Point Engineering book on "Affordable Animatronics Vol1" right now. Any advice on other books that would get me started would be much appreciated!


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## blazernut2k (Aug 20, 2009)

The absolute classic in this area is called "Getting Started with Electronics" by Forrest M. Mimm. I know that Radio Shack used to sell it, I'm also pretty sure you can buy a used copy for cheap off of Amazon.


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## Wicked Saw 2 Cut (Jul 12, 2009)

*Parallax*

As you mentioned "Parallax". I would hit there web sight. Also the "efx-tek forum for info on Parallax products and downloads of operation manuals and compilers.


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## hpropman (Jul 27, 2008)

I second the MIms book (getting started in electronics) also if you go to my website in the links section there is a link for a free online electronics course. it has everything in the Mims book and more. Also here is a link on how to use a multimeter:

http://www.ladyada.net/library/metertut/

Other books that I recommend is "Robot building for beginners" and "Intermediate robot building". by David cook. Don't dismiss them because they are about building robots there is a lot great of electronics information in the books and even some metal working. There is a lot of overlap between robotics and animatronics. Davids website is here and the books are available from amazon.

http://robotroom.com/

The last thing that I want to bring to you attention is the Picaxe microcontroller. The cheapest and easiest way to get started in microcontrollers bar none. Read the Microcontrollers 101 from my website. use the links to get information and the manuals and the software are free. The chips themselves start at about $3.50. There are a ton of great sites out there for the picaxe. There is nothing that the Prop 1 / 2 or the basic stamp can do that the picaxe can not. the main difference other than the price is the fact that you are buying a chip not a controller so you have to build the board yourself. PM me if you need any more information.


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## SelcSilverhand (Aug 5, 2009)

Thank you all for the advice. I ordered a couple of the books online, the one by Mimms and the Art of electronics so far. I'm checking out the links on hpropman's site right now. Thanks again!


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## Otaku (Dec 3, 2004)

A good site for asking questions and searching out projects is www.allaboutcircuits.com. I see a fair number of Halloween projects over there.


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