Electrical Engineering

The essential parts for beginning (or even experienced) hobbyists that gives you all of the basic through-hole components you will need to get started playing with embedded projects. We'll identify a few parts in the kit and provide a few basic circuits to get started!

Assembly and application of the 8-pin SOIC-to-DIP adapter.

An overview of the inner workings of a battery and how it was invented.

Learn the basics about LEDs as well as some more advanced topics to help you calculate requirements for projects containing many LEDs.

A tutorial on all things resistors. What is a resistor, how do they behave in parallel/series, decoding the resistor color codes, and resistor applications.

Welcome to the wonderful world of breadboards. Here we will learn what a breadboard is and how to use one to build your very first circuit.

How to work the dials and buttons on an oscilloscope, and a glossary of the o-scope lexicon.

The basics behind the batteries used in portable electronic devices: LiPo, NiMH, coin cells, and alkaline.

A tutorial to help figure out the power requirements of your project.

How to use the 74HC4051 multiplexer breakout to drive eight LEDs, read eight button inputs, or monitor eight potentiometers.

What exactly IS a PCB? This tutorial will breakdown what makes up a PCB and some of the common terms used in the PCB world.

Discussing what thermal resistance is, how it’s used for thermal management, and how to maximize the life of your project.

This tutorial covers the concept of analog and digital signals, as they relate to electronics.

An introduction to integrated circuits (ICs). Electronics' ubiquitous black chips. Includes a focus on the variety of IC packages.

A tutorial on electronics' most overlooked and underappreciated component: the switch! Here we explain the difference between momentary and maintained switches and what all those acronyms (NO, NC, SPDT, SPST, ...) stand for.

Build a Boss Alarm that alerts you of anyone walking into your office and automatically changes your computer screen.

Building a pedal around the Teensy 3.2 and Teensy Audio shield. Changing the effect in the pedal is as easy as uploading a new sketch!

Not working as expected? In this tutorial, we will be exploring a few general troubleshooting tips and possible solutions that frequently come up with SparkFun's Technical Support.

This tutorial will show you how to use a headless Raspberry Pi to flash hex files onto AVR microcontrollers as a stand-alone programmer. It also tells the story about production programming challenges, how SparkFun came to this solution, and all the lessons learned along the way.

How to strip, crimp, and work with wire.

Classroom STEM activity that has students build a battery from a lemon, measure the open and closed circuit voltages, and determine the battery's internal resistance.

Learn the differences between AC and DC, the history, different ways to generate AC and DC, and examples of applications.

Turn a large voltage into a smaller one with voltage dividers. This tutorial covers: what a voltage divider circuit looks like and how it is used in the real world.

Learn how to create your own Fritzing part so you can make amazing looking wiring diagrams, learn about schematics and PCB design, and get your design fabbed into a real PCB with Fritzing's PCB manufacturing service.