Tutorials

How to create your own e-textiles buttons.

Let's see what's inside the amazing new Leap Motion input device!

An overview of electric power, the rate of energy transfer. We'll talk definition of power, watts, equations, and power ratings. 1.21 gigawatts of tutorial fun!

Learn about all things capacitors. How they're made. How they work. How they look. Types of capacitors. Series/parallel capacitors. Capacitor applications.

An introduction to polarity in electronic components. Discover what polarity is, which parts have it, and how to identify it.

We can see electricity in action on our computers, lighting our houses, as lightning strikes in thunderstorms, but what is it? This is not an easy question, but this tutorial will shed some light on it!

How to install drivers for the FTDI Basic on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Learn the difference between 3.3V and 5V devices and logic levels.

Instructions on hooking up to and communicating with the Si4707 Weather Band Radio Breakout using an Arduino.

A guest tutorial from the astonishingly talented Mario the Magician showing how to put together your own servo-controlled lapel flower.

Make a soft circuit firefly jar with conductive thread, LEDs, and the LilyTwinkle!

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.

A diode primer! Diode properties, types of diodes, and diode applications.

The LilyPad MP3 Player is an amazing little board that contains almost everything you need to play audio files. You can use it to create all kinds of noisy projects, from MP3 hoodies to talking teddy bears. Your imagination is the only limit! This tutorial will help you get started.

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.

Send serial data from Arduino to Processing and back - even at the same time!

How to hook up and use the OpenSegment display shield. The OpenSegment is the big brother to the Serial 7-Segment Display. They run on the same firmware, however the OpenSegment is about twice as big.

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.

A quick introduction to accelerometers, how they work, and why they're used.

A step-by-step guide to installing and testing the Arduino software on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Because some of our boards need to be re-humidified after reflow, we decided to make our own humidor. This tutorial will focus on how to model a project in 3D and then fabricate it using a CNC routing machine.

The Uncertain 7-Cube is a non-committal, less-than-helpful, but also entirely honest fortune teller. Simply ask it a yes or no question, give it a nudge, and the 7-Cube will dutifully inform you that it doesn’t have all the facts and doesn’t feel comfortable making a guess.

How SparkFun assembles SMD electronics.

An introduction to the concept of Pulse Width Modulation.