First steps with the breadboard
The packages that I ordered arrived fairly quickly. First the breadboards from the Netherlands then the components from Germany. As Ben recommended the BusBoard BB830, this is what I have ordered, 3 of them and an additional BB830-KIT. It comes with an additional battery box, jumper wires and an LED plus resistor for a simple test. I find the battery box quite useful, because it is mobile so you can take your assembled circuit for example to show off in front of your family or colleagues.
With my son we decided to start with the clock module first and to build an astable timer based on the 555 chip following the video from Ben Eater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo
Ben was using the Texas Instruments LM555 timer, but as it was out of stock, I have ordered the TLC555, which should work in the same way and to my understanding it might even have a better performance. Just to understand the price range, we are talking about a 0.96€ component.
Another difference is that we used a 1 MΩ resistor and not a 100 kΩ, because that’s what I have ordered, but that was not a problem, it just meant that the blinking was slower. Anyway the idea was to replace it with a potentiometer so that we can change the resistance up to 2 MΩ. Also we realized that the white stripe on the capacitor marks the negative contact, not the positive as in the video.
So we put together the circuit as shown in the video, turned it on, aaaand…. it almost worked. The LED turned on, and then after a while it turned off and remained so. But a quick check on the data sheet revealed the problem: the pin 4, which Ben has not connected (at least not in the first 20 minutes) is the reset pin. It is active low, so we connected it to +5V to avoid the 555 resetting, and voilá, the circuit was working as expected.
What we did not do is the check with the oscilloscope, because I don’t have one, but maybe if I’m becoming more experienced and turning into a hobby HW engineer, I might get one.
IVAO
