You may someone who scrolls through the pages of Tindie thinking, “all of this looks awesome, but I don’t know where to start.” Not to worry, I was in your place once. Electronics hardware (mostly soldering) can be daunting for beginners.
Thankfully, the My First Circuit Kit solves this problem by offering an option that gets you into everything without the need for any soldering. The kit comes with several basic components: LEDs, resistors, capacitors, and so on. It also includes others that are a little more interesting, like a photo-resistor.
The overall design is a joule thief that powers some LEDs in low-light conditions. An interesting element of the design is the way a 1.5V battery manages to light up two LEDs that require 3V each. Sounds impossible, right?
The circuit itself has a voltage booster area that increases the power to 6V through an oscillation which sends voltage to the capacitor. When the capacitor is fully charged, the transistor releases all the voltage to the LEDs at once until the battery is fully discharged. This clever design lets you squeeze (or steal — which is where the name comes from) energy out of these common alkaline batteries, long after most devices would have stopped running.
The plug-and-play design ensures that anyone can dive in and bring this kit to life!
