Nuts and Volts DIY Magazine

Online edition of US print magazine Nuts and Volts. Aimed at the electronics hobbyist, with articles covering amateur radio, cellular communications.

Nuts & Volts is written for the hands-on hobbyist, design engineer, technician, and experimenter. The diversity of subjects appeals to all levels of experience and spans such topics as amateur robotics, circuit design, lasers, computer control, home automation, microcontrollers, data acquisition, new technology, DIY projects, electronic theory, and more, not to mention the popular BASIC Stamp.

Adding More Digital I/O to your 16-Bit Experimenter Kit

If you’ve been following the 16-Bit Micro Experimenter series in Nuts & Volts, you are already familiar with its solderless breadboard environment and the fully programmable 10 line I/O expansion bus that comes with the kit. The 10 lines can be assigned to be digital, analog or even connected to any of the PIC24F Microcontroller’s internal extensive peripheral set (i.e. dual UART, five CCP modules, ADC, Real time Clock Calendar, dual SPI, and dual I2C).

The Mini-Bench Supply

A small power supply with +5V, +12V, and -12V outputs is a handy thing to have around when you’re breadboarding circuits with both op-amps and digital ICs. You would want a switching regulator for efficiency, but linear regulators for low noise. Plus, it should be easy to build and relatively inexpensive.