first solder

Few days ago I had travelled around the city in search of many electrical and electronic stuff to start off my hobby. I reached "Electronic Bazar" in RP road got hold of a circuit board. The usage of my soldering iron was being held by my UK plug soldering iron, so i also bought a 3 pin converter. Today suddenly it struck me and I took off time to start to learn to solder. It was very easy though. Followed the steps according to a site.
Cleaned all the stuff used to solder and successfully soldered a resistor. Now to continue wid the rest of the circuit.

parallel ports

i jus got this wierd thought. can we control hardware directly thru pc? i went in for some research and learnt a lot. the best method i found out was to use parallel ports. i made an intensive study of parallel ports. i had an extra parallel cable which i used to study. it was easy to open it up.

only pins 2 to 9 are used named as D0-D7. pins frm 14-25 are ground pins. the "hello world" counterpart of lpt1 ports is to use led's soldered to the port and in C we simply use dos.h and outport() function. i am yet to try this as this has the side effect of pc risks.

basic stamp

in desperate attempts to find out how to program microcontrollers and control motors, i came thru this stuff. its calld a basic stamp ckt. parallax inc makes these circuits. pretty expensive off the shelf comng to around 5K big bucks! it consists of a microcontroller pic16c57 wid other components and a serial port. jus plug this port to the pc and code in a lang called pbasic. hit run and the s/w doz the rest. it burns the program into the IC. it turns out much cheaper than an Ic burner but still expensive. i now off to findng a way to build this ckt.

microcontroller

my journey to expt wid live actual electronics started wid an idea to control motors using electronics. the control of motors can then be used for various purposed like device direction, etc. in the process of searching for motors i came across one servo motor. highly expensive (around 800) thn i also got to kno about microcontrollers. basically these IC's are used to program and connect to the motor wich controls wen the motor has to rotate and all. these microcontrollers are really amazing things and i spent time for a detail study and got to kno bout the pins and its control. it was indeed exciting. now i guess the tough part is to find an IC...