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A number of projects and circuits published in Practical Electronics
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Practical Electronics | August | 2023
Volume 52. No. 8
August 2023
ISSN 2632 573X
Editorial
Interested in robots?
One project that really caught my eye this month is SPY-DER, an
elegant design for a 3D-printed robot. It’s a great example of how
much has changed in the word of DIY robotics. What once was a real
mechanical engineering challenge can now be easily tackled with an
inexpensive 3D printer. All you need are a few simple-to-fabricate
plastic parts and some low-cost servo motors, and pretty quickly you
can be up and running with a fascinating dynamic system.
The other half of the robot equation is of course the controller, and
here modern microcontrollers enable designers – new and experienced
– to implement a huge variety of control systems of varying
sophistication. SPY-DER uses representatives from both the Arduino
and Raspberry Pi families of microcontrollers/single-board computers,
neatly demonstrating how flexible control systems can be.
Wide-range OhmMeter
The other project I particularly enjoyed reading this month is our
new OhmMeter. Measuring resistance, particularly very low values,
is not an especially ‘glamorous’ topic in electronics, but there are
times when you really do need to know the exact resistance value
of a shunt or some other sub-ohm device. Ordinary DVMs are not
much use here, and dedicated commercial instrumentation gets
expensive very quickly. Our Wide-range Ohmmeter is the answer
and really should be part of everyone’s kit.
Need a (cheap) book?
We sell a few select books from our online shop; mainly as a service
to our readers. These days it’s not a great money-spinner, thanks of
course to Amazon, and to a lesser extent eBay. They set the price
against which all others compete and given the economies of scale
they bring to the market, it can be very difficult to undercut them.
We recently had an order for Newnes Electronics Toolkit (2nd Ed,
paperback) by Geoff Phillips. It’s a good book, but it should be at £45!
Unfortunately, we were out of stock, so I phoned the purchaser and
offered a full refund. While we were chatting, I browsed eBay and
Amazon and found plenty of secondhand copies from around £2.50. I
suggested we provide one of these at cost since the contents would be
the same and the book would be effectively 95% off the normal price.
The purchaser agreed and I haven’t heard any complaints. I mention
this simply because a lot of electronics books have become very
expensive, but if you don’t mind a few dog-eared pages – sometimes
not even that level of damage – then there are real bargains to be had
online. An important point worth bearing in mind is that Amazon
offers secondhand books, often from multiple professional vendors –
do check them as well as auction sites. So, as Jake Rothman correctly
points out in this month’s Audio Out – it really is better to reuse rather
than recycle (pulp!) a pre-owned book.
Matt Pulzer
Publisher
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