Purpose & Flow

Purpose

This site is geared around projects that you can do with electronic kits, circuit demonstrations,and various tools to help with these endeavors. Many of the tutorials one may come across on these topics are either too simple, complicated, or simply verbose. Heck, sometimes when learning about a new topic it can be unclear just which skills one should have a handle on to proceed in said topic. The goal of this site is to give you enough insight into a project to allow you to alter it to fit your needs or use an aspect of it in your own endeavors.

What Should You Know

To be clear, this site won’t teach you C, C++, VHDL, or circuit analysis. It assumes that you have a working knowledge of these tools. If you can read some C code and have a good idea of what it does, then you’re in good shape. Similarly, it’s not going to explain to you how a diode is supposed to function, or how to apply various circuit analysis techniques in general. No: if you don’t know KCL, KVL, and basic nodal analysis this site will not help you. However, it will demonstrate how to use these tools in the projects.

Some software tools used here (i.e. Vivado, Qt, LtSpice) will eventually have Overview pages dedicated to them to give a sold framework for use in the projects. These won’t be complete references, but they will give a solid framework to follow their use in the projects, so that you can at least follow along. In addition to software, there will be Overview pages dedicated to the ZYBO, and Texas Instruments Launchpad kits. Currently, I have these two kits on hand, and have found them very useful, and fun.

Flow

How you go about a project is important. Not only do you have to be clear on what you’re doing, but you also must make sure you have all the resources, and tools, to pull it off. The projects on Triston Does Projects (TDP) will consist of four main sections:

  1.  Project Scope (The What and Why) – contains a brief description, purpose of the project, and desired outcome.

  2. The Tools! (Equipment and Software) - a list of the equipment, and software needed. This will also include a listof used parts, if applicable.

  3. Implementation (The How and the Why) - likely to be the lengthiest section. It will contain a theory of operation when needed, an overview of steps for implementation, and step by step description of said implementation.

  4. Outcome (Did It Work) – simply a summary of the results.

Any program files used will be downloadable and links will be provided. The goal of any project is to enable anyone following along to alter an aspect of a project for their own use, or just give a good framework for other projects.