My lifetime interest in electronics was sparked by a physics teacher at high school who set up an electronics club. The first thing I made was a simple audio oscillator that was triggered by drops of rain falling on a printed circuit board with interleaved rows of tracks close to each other but not touching. It was used as a rain warning for my mother when she had washing hanging outside. I still have it and it still works!
Many of these resources combine my interest in electronics and in making physics teaching aids. The musical continuity tester is good example of this.
More recently, I've been playing around with the
BBC Micro:bit microcontroller and have found it to be amazingly flexible with lots of support and third-party devices to extend its capability. I'll be adding pages on my Micro:bit projects over the coming months.
In the meantime, here's a photo of a 'tea bag jiggler' I made for a friend who wanted one to work for up to five minutes. The Micro:bit controls the stepper motor motion, displays instructions, displays time remaining and plays musical sounds when beginning and ending its jiggle.
