designers being wanky

[adularia]

Argh.

Naively, I think: sourcing and buying parts - not finished fixtures, mere parts, because I don't want finished fixtures, because I'm trying to prototype one, that's the point - is going to be half of the hard part of getting all this off the ground

Comments

[3ricj]

The art of electronics is god. The stuff you are talking about hasn't changed in quite some time.

As far as basics of electronics go - - I just picked up a copy of ISBN 978-0878912230 for the lab. It covers the basics. Heat is pretty easy - - it's watts. Lower wattage = less heat. LEDs well outperform anything else on the market today in that regard.

[holeinthedonut]

Man! I'd love to get ahold of a book like that, too. I keep wishing and wishing there was a simple "electronics for beginners" class I could take, because I know there are simple, neat things you can do with electricity, but I don't want to dedicate my entire college career to becoming an electrician just to know those tricks.

[adularia]

I'm planning on looking at the two books 3ricj mentioned. dymaxion and randomdreams have also spoken highly of The Art of Electronics

One of my classes did have a pretty nice "electronics for beginners" component, but each group had a mentor-type with 3 or 4 decades of electronics experience to tell them what to buy and what circuit to build. I think a lot of my difficulty is not even knowing what sorts of components I'd need.

[randomdreams]

The old Radio Shack/Forrest Mims "Engineer's Notebook" series of very short books -- more pamphlets, really -- does an excellent job of teaching you enough to work in a specific area, be it digital, sensors, timers, or what-have-you, and it's far less comprehensive or overwhelming than Art Of Electronics.
Likewise, the US Navy has a two-volume set of introduction to electronics that's pretty good, and I believe Dover has reprinted it. It's a little bit tube-based for my tastes, but electrons still do the same thing, and transistors still work the same way.

[adularia]

huh, cool. I will definitely look for the Radio Shack books.

like, right now.

Oh! I wanted to tell you. I was talking to someone in my stonesetting class who also does mokume-gane. She said there aren't many people who've written about it, and I mentioned you, and she said she knew about your website and found it very useful.

[ilmarinen]

uh, forgive my ignorance, what kind of thing are you doing? I mean, understand you have to be all mums-the-word about details maybe, but category?

-B.

[adularia]

I don't have to be cagey about it. :) What prompted this post is that I've been designing a lot of lamps lately, some of which I want to try prototyping/getting manufactured, and I would like to be able to throw together a sample light unit that shows my intent for the finished product.

In this case, it has to use T8 fluorescent tubes. I'm tempted to just buy and gut a commercial fixture, but I'd rather find out where the socket bits come from. ("China.")

[ilmarinen]

Ballasts and sockets for fluorescents aren't really hard to find. Ballasts are service items (can buy those at home depot) and I think I've seen sockets somewhere. Alternately, buying a bare-bones utility light fixture for tube fluorescents is basically a ballast and sockets in a metal housing (that is recyclable at least).

-B.

[ilmarinen]

Hrm, yeah, quick web search shows places one can buy the sockets and ballasts direct, sans case/frame, etc. Not wholesale, but assume you are just prototyping at this point, not looking to economically order 1,000 of them.

http://www.lightbulbsdirect.com/page/001/CTGY/SocketsFlT8T12
http://www.lightbulbsdirect.com/page/001/CTGY/T8+BA