I’m taking Physics during the summer, and we’ve been studying capacitance / resistance / inductance and what not, so I got a little excited and decided to delve into circuitry and electronics a bit.
My first idea was to build a little LED panel to make happy faces similar to the one seen here: LED Panel. But this would require a larger investment than I was willing to make, considering you’d need to buy a PIC (programmable integrated circuit) as well as the burning unit (which transfers the code to the chip). So I decided to pull back and put together a simple Infra-Red Receiver. Pictures are available here: IR Receiver Pictures. As you can tell from the pictures, I would never claim to be a master solder-er (can you say it like that?) But it works! And using an open-source project WinLIRC I was able to configure my Aiwa stereo remote control to perform the basic playback fucntions of WinAmp.
Fun stuff….