2021-01-22 - Breadboard ------------------------------------------------------------------- So i've enjoyed two nice weeks having a little time off from my work in december. And after i went back to work in january, time sped up again and now january is almost over. And i don't even know what happened. Life certainly is strange. And so is time. I've been wanting to tinker about with electronics. I managed to do a little during the holiday. But not as much as i would have liked. And now in january, work has taken over again and coming back from work tired, i don't do much in the evenings. But hey, it is the weekend. And weekends are nice. I might be able to read a book. Or maybe play around with the breadboard. The other day i played with some 555 timers, making astable multivibrators, and then feeding the pulse signals into a couple of 74193 counters which i found in my electronics box. So i had a nice binary led counter that'd count to 255. Nothing particularly shocking (ha), but just nice to play around with. The nice thing about the 74193 is that they can do a lot. They can count up and down and can be preset to a value. Handy stuff. Now i'm thinking of it, i think i might add a flip-flop to switch the input signal of the counter between the increase and decrease pins. This way the counter will count up till a certain value (trigger the flip-flop) and count down again. (and reset the flip-flop). The circuit wouldn't have much purpose, of course, except for entertaining myself a bit. But it's just much fun to be able to build things up like that on a breadboard. But for now, first thing to do, is to have some good night's rest. And tomorrow we celebrate the weekend by puttering about for some time, and wondering where the time is going.