The Maker Movement

Solder and Circuits happens to be part of the Maker Movement, by coincidence. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are popular with makers. In 2015, Arduinos are cropping up in Augusta, GA high-school projects for Science Olympiad.

Buy Make magazine at Barnes and Noble, and look at Make on Wikipedia.org. Some of the Maker things are copyrighted.

Some phrases from the Wikipedia page:

do it yourself (DIY) and DIWO (Do It With Others)

computers, electronics, robotics, metalworking, woodworking

leaders from the maker movement include Mr. Jalopy and Dale Dougherty

a book subtitled All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things in Backyards, Garages, and Basements

MAKE Controller Kit Developer MakingThings, LLC http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKMT3

Solder and Circuits is pointed at modest projects that succeed most of the time, whereas what you see at Maker Faires are extravagant projects that are flashy and marginally useful. Solder and Circuits aims more toward understanding, engineering, and using math.

STEM, learning Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, is an emphasis of the Technology Association of Georgia's Education Collaborative.

While Radio Shack was in business, you would find the above on their web site. The Jameco Company and Digi-Key are popular, now, with makers.

A new DIY thing, Feb 2012: Raspberry Pi from England. $35. A full computer with HDMI as monitor, limited to Linux. You can do some programming, especially Python. It does not need a PC to program it. The statement by the British developers is that their computer-science freshmen had never programmed before, and RPi is intended to be used by middle schoolers and high schoolers. This cheap computer will have a big impact in third-world countries. Look for U.S. computer-science grads to have competition from Kenyans.

The Model B has serial port (RS-232), I²C, SPI, 8 general-purpose I/O pins. Class 10 SDHC memory may not work, use Class 4 or 6. Linux is Debian variant, LXDE desktop.

Cory bought me a Raspberry Pi outfit and got the SD memory outfitted with the operating system, thanks Cory. Hooked it up to the wired LAN in the apartment and was able to surf the Web, though slowly. 2015: Raspberry Pi Zero is $5, but needs SD card and other things to be usable.

July 2012: Alternative to Raspberry Pi is Via APC, which adds VGA. $49. It uses Android, a variety of Linux.

The woman engineer in Manhattan, New York City, Limor Fried, has a company that designs and markets kits. The company name is Adafruit. Her kits are so popular that she was featured on the cover of Wired magazine.

Q&A: Open Source Electronics Pioneer Limor Fried on the DIY Revolution

By Chris Anderson March 29, 2011 | 12:00 pm | Wired April 2011

Limor Fried: One of the things about doing projects is that documenting them and sharing them with people used to be really difficult. Now we see so many people putting up videos, and it’s so easy. I can make a five-minute video in an hour, with a preface and edits and nice audio and everything. And I think that makes a difference, because when people are exposed to this stuff and they actually get to see it, they get inspired.

There are also so many really great websites where people can share their projects. We have Instructables and iFixit and Etsy and Make and Hack a Day and our own Adafruit. So people who used to do this stuff alone now have even more community. It used to be just freaks in garages; now it’s [ ] working together.

In the May 2013 IEEE Spectrum is a whole page about Limor Fried. Their lower-Manhattan facility is 1100 sq. meters. Dec 2012 Entrepreneur magazine: Fried is Entrepreneur of the Year. She encourages girls to do STEM. She has a master's degree in EE from MIT. Some bold DIYers who are customers of Adafruit call up an engineer at Adafruit for telephone advice.

Arduino is in many Adafruit kits. It is an Italian microprocessor-on-a-board with digital input/output and analog to digital conversion. It is small and cheap. Look at Wikipedia. The programming language is a simpler C.

Here are some parts and kits suppliers

Jameco.com Jameco $9 solar cell grab bag, function generator kit $28, Jan 2013, I bought a solar-cell grab bag and got a good deal, six 5cmx10cm cells, plus some usable broken pieces.

Circuit Skills #4 - Surface Mount Device Experimenter

KIT-CS4-SMT Part no. 2124197

Jameco may have the more common ICs at lower price than Mouser.

Sparkfun.com

KIT-09484 Digital Oscilloscope DIY Kit $59.95 a kit from China

Jameco has hobby links.

http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/TechTip/electronicsdesign.html

http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/email/corner/gregs-corner-learning-is-fun-all.html: From Jameco's perspective, electronics is creating this passion for many everyday. We get emails from students excited about robotics. We get emails from grandfathers wondering how young is too young to teach their grandchildren soldering. (Ten is O.K. if there is interest.) And we get emails from our customers with exciting inventions and projects that their children have created.