Shopping for electronics
The internets provide a million places to purchase electronic components for the part-time hobbyist like myself, but lots of them seem to cater to the wealthy full-time hobbyist. I'm keeping a list here for my own reference.
Servo limit testing
So, I bought a servo to play around with, since I was over by the hobby shop the other day. The cheapest one they had was a Hitec something-or-other with "Kryptonite" gears. It's a beauty (I guess... I'm not a servo connoisseur). I tried a couple of the drivers available on code.tinyclr.com and got the same results with both: the servo didn't travel anywhere near the 180 degrees it should have.
MDLS-20464 LCD module
I purchased an MDLS-20464K (specifically, MDLS20464K-LV-LED04G-G) 20x4 character LCD module from RA-Elco today for $5 hoping that I'd be able to figure out how to interface with it. I figured it was cheap enough that it wouldn't be a big deal if I couldn't.
Surplus Stepper Motors
I've been looking for cheap stepper motors for a couple weeks now, and I've realized something: modern printers do not have stepper motors, and while scanners do seem to have them, modern scanners tend to have very small stepper motors. Digging through the local Deseret Industries for cheap scanners from which to extract stepper motors the other day, I had an epiphany: typewriters. Typewriters are ideal for a couple reasons:
Fabrication
I remember the first time I saw "fabrication" done. I was at the home of my cousin's friend, and he had been previously occupying himself producing tiny "climbing claws" from bent nails. I remember that this had a quite profound effect on me.
Interesting ICs that one should know about
I'm putting this list here, so I can refer back to it later when I'm looking for ideas for a project.