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so a small hobby of mine has taught me a great deal of things about low voltage electronics. just wanted to know if you guys would be interested in a few items i could show how to make. prepping for things like this can be costly when you buy certain electronics and some can be cheaply made from items you can get at radio shack.

one i was thinking would be great would be a solar trickle charger, which is what i would start with. could charge AA and AAA batteries and up to automotive batteries too, though that would require a bit more work. if you guys are interested i can put up a tutorial as well as other things by request. im no expert but i know a great deal about making these circuits and how to make them reliable.

yes i realize you can get things like this with a quick google search but having a group of people talking about it will give more people good ideas. also i would present it in a way that would show your options on how to arrange them for different enclosures.
 
ill pick some things up tomorrow and get to work. i have a fair bit of things i can make several items with already but i will still need some other components to make it work well.
 
okay so i have put up a simple and to the point tutorial in the forum on the solar trickle charger. i plan to go a bit further on it sometime before the end of next week, for adding a couple of other goodies to it. are there any other items someone would like to see? i dont think i can go as far as radio communication but i can do some surprisingly helpful items. some radio items are possible still, alarms and such are very easy too.

any ideas?
 
If you're up to it, I've been looking around for a good long while for a decent schematic for a shortwave AM receiver that has a good detector in it. For something like this, it would also be pretty easy to build in one of those one-chip AM/FM radio receiver chips. I was out at PDM (tradeshow) today, and talked to more than a few board manufacturers. I wouldn't mind putting together a pre-made circuit board along with the chips as a kit if people wanted.
 
i dont know a whole lot about radio circuits, did a quick google on the terms you used. just so im not getting this wrong, are you talking about a radio scanner? if so, sounds interesting.
 
I'm talking about a useful handheld receiver radio... one that gets broadcast AM/FM and shortwave (I spend a lot of time listening to SW, looking for numbers stations, listening to the NIST time standard signals and HF ham radio signals). It looks like the way to go is with a superheterodyne receiver (the kind you find in most modern AM radios), I've found more than a few circuits for this. However what I did find is this:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227

Pretty much it's a "radio on chip", which with a little bit of accessory switches and the like will give you a very full featured radio, and most importantly, it can be made insanely small. You could probably have a full radio that you put some batteries in, a set of earbuds, and a coil of antenna wire that would fit inside a pack of smokes with room for extras. (altoids tin might also work)
 
i would be interested in a schematic for that. would be fun to dabble in radio a bit.

that chip wont be any good for a hand made radio though. the size of it makes it easy to make your project small but requires a PCB to have pads an traces you could put it on. its impossible with your typical garage equipment. you would need to find a larger one with the same parameters. the leads on that are literally less than 0.05 inches wide, you would never be able to use a solder iron and not solder them together.
 
They are actually fairly easy to work with, you can buy photoresist and boards from many places (even radioshack sells them) and with a common laserjet printer, you can make the templates for your photoresist. Hell, you can even get the boards, paint the traces on them (by hand) and then etch off the rest of the copper with ferric chloride.

That said, all you have to do to solder the chip down is use soldering paste and a hot plate... you put the paste down, stick the chip on it, and then put the whole thing in a toaster oven. It's actually much easier than doing the classic point to point routing.
 

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