Whether you’re an electronics hobbyist, like me, or a professional in the industry, you’re going to need a lot of electronic components to build your circuits. As the number of brick & mortar retailers that offer electronic parts has dwindled, in most cases this will mean you need to order parts online, with the inevitable wait until they arrive.

This gave me a reason to create my collection of electronic components so they’d be ready to use whenever a project of mine called for them. The best and most seemingly economical way to do this was to purchase components in kits of parts. These are normally put together and marketed for a certain type of component for multiple values/variations.

Purchasing these electronic parts kits has helped me to build up my stockpile of components and has come in handy with just the right part for multiple projects thus far. But,….there is a downside.

My Amazon packages started to come more frequently with these little kits and modules that were the result of stoking the fire for my online retail adventures. Soon other online retailers were involved such as Jameco electronics, Digikey, AliExpress, Battery Hookup and more. When I realized that some of these purchases had such reasoning behind them of “I’m sure I can use this someday” or “I may not find this part again” I figured out I might have a problem. I was an Electronic Parts Kit Addict.

With that public admission out there, and expressed in this video, I’ll also cover some of the more practical reasons why purchasing such kits, AS NEEDED AND IN MODERATION, can be a very good thing to stock up your electronics workbench. I’ll even show you some of the kits that I’ve purchased, admittedly mostly from Amazon and give my impressions on which kits are the best and some of the thought processes behind my decisions to buy certain ones.

If you’re building up your electronic parts stockpile for your own work bench, hopefully this will give you some good ideas, but this is also a cautionary tale as this can be very additive, as you’ll see.

Thanks for watching my video. If you enjoyed the content please like and subscribe as it really does encourage us Youtubers to create more content and shows us which topics people want to see the most. Take care!

https://youtu.be/ua6POZ_oPLY

A robot’s ability to be able to recognize the objects it sees around it is a crucial part of being able to operate within the world it will be working in.

This video shows how you can install some pretty awesome software that can utilize your Raspberry Pi Camera to detect and identify specific objects. The application for this in robotics and other automated systems where a machine needs to see something and be able to know what it’s seeing is enormous.

This has it’s limitations, but also tremendous possibilities. In this video, you’ll see how a Raspberry Pi amateur like myself can utilize a great resource found on GitHub.com and be able to get this amazing system working. We’ll show you the process, but when you’re ready to install it yourself, best to get yourself over to the EdgeElectronics GitHub.com article link shown below as all credit is due there for making this possible, along with the Google libraries contributed. I did find a hint that helps for those not as familiar with working with Raspberry Pis, like myself, although experienced users will probably just get a chuckle out of it.

Here’s the EdgeElectronics Article with all the Install Information you need: https://github.com/EdjeElectronics/Te…

The Raspberry Pi 4, now available with 8 Gigabytes and this Canakit is a great way to get everything needed to get started, so we decided to check it out in this review.

In this video we’ll unbox, setup and review a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB start up kit from Canakit. This is a basic kit that gives you everything you need to set up the included Raspberry Pi 4 microcomputer except for the video screen, keyboard and mouse. So if you’re like me and had those spare computer components lying around, you may want to check out this review of the Canakit starter kit for this newest version of the Pi 4 with it’s maxed out 8 Gigabytes of memory.

We’ll show you everything that comes in the kit and how you put it all together to have a functioning Raspberry Pi 4 and give you our honest impressions. Normally this sells for $119 on Amazon.com which is where we bought this one from. I did have some issues with some odd bands showing on the video screen, likely due to filming 30 frames per second while the screen was projecting 60 frames. Apologies in advance for that, but I thought it was important enough content to not edit it out.

This kit comes with a “Premium” Black Plastic case that snaps together easily, along with the power supply, one Micro HDMI to regular HDMI cable and a 32GB micro SD card that is preloaded with NOOBS so you can get yourself up and running as soon as you fire it up.

So if you’re considering buying this basic Canakit to avoiding having to buy all the parts you need separately, this may be the video for you. Hope you like it!

When working on electronic projects, you got to have power to make them work.  After getting a surprise complete 120 VAC to 5 VDC buck converter board in an electronics grab bag from Jameco Electronics, I decided to make a larger project out of it and create this dual DC Power Supply.

I went out and bought an additional 12 Volt DC power converter board so that I’d have the power needed for my future projects and planned to use both in the project. Everything didn’t work out perfectly with that plan, but we invite you to check out the journey to the completed power supply unit, capable of providing both 12 and 5 Volts of DC power.

Problems with the size of components and meter displays with faulting and limited documentation did cause problems, but in the end, we were able to make it work.

Hope you enjoy the project video, warts and all.

This video covers some of the features of different batteries that went into our decision for our future bot. We’ll examine the basic types of batteries available that can power your electronic projects, which may even be for a robot or two. We’ll look at the major pros and cons of each battery chemistry and will reveal which battery type we’ve chosen for our own dream robot project.

We hope you feel empowered after watching our video and that it will help you to select just the right battery for your project as well.

In order to eventually build your dream robot, you need to have a functioning computer, so it was time that my old MacBook Pro (Mid-2014) got a Solid State Drive upgrade.  Seeing as I didn’t even have enough storage to upgrade to the new Big Sur mac IOS, this seemed a fitting time to open up my beloved MacBook Pro for the very first time and do some surgery.

I chose the OWC (Other World Computing) SSD Drive Upgrade kit with the Envoy Pro enclosure to keep my old Solid State Drive in the game and out of a landfill.  While admittedly a little shabby in the production value, we hope it will provide anyone in a similar upgrade situation with enough valuable information to help them make their decision.

 
We hope you enjoy our new Youtube video.

MacBook Pro (Mid-2014) OWC 480 GB SSD Upgrade with the Envoy Pro Enclosure

Join us on our journey to make our dream robot, one circuit at a time!

The Goal:  Create our dream Humanoid Robot, capable of complex activities, aware of its environment, and having the Four Laws of Robotics as its base consciousness.

Fans of the Science Fiction writer, Issac Asimov, will be familiar with the Three Laws of Robotics but we here at Smithbotics felt it wise to add a fourth law to prevent some possible bad actions from nefarious humans with bad intentions. Once we get to to the level of development where our robots can make decisions, we’ll program them with these modified Laws of Robotics:

1.  A robot may not allow harm to happen to a human by any action or inaction.
2. A robot will obey specific orders from its owner unless it conflicts with the First Law of Robotics
3. A robot shall obey instructions from humans in general unless they conflict with the First or Second Law of Robotics
4. A robot shall not allow harm to come to itself unless that conflicts with the First, Second, or Third Law of Robotics.

This is a very lofty goal and will be a difficult project to complete, especially since there is so much for us to learn and develop along the way.  So the only way to tackle this is by working at it, one circuit at a time.  We’ll be working with Arduinos, Rasberry Pis, other microcontrollers, microprocessors, full motherboards, servos, linear actuators, batteries, breadboard, and a myriad of electronic components and electromechanical systems to make this all happen.

We invite you to join us on this long journey where we will be learning many things along the way, and attempting to share what we’ve learned as well on this website and Youtube videos.

(C) 2016 -2021 – S. Steven Smith, Smithbotics.com