Basic EE
Start with the tutorial on Basic EE by Rebecca Bruce
LEDs
The most basic output device is the LED, but don’t fry your LED.
- Sparkfun’s LED Current Limiting Resistors tutorial or Adafruit’s All about LEDs tutorial
- current limiting resitor calculator
- Some specs
Controlling power with LEDs and servo
Controlling power with PWM
Pulse Wave Modulation is the most common way to control the brightness of an LED. (Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi is behind Arduino in this one.)
- Pulse Width Modulation tutorial from Sparkfun
analogWrite()
on Arduino
Controlling motion with a servo
Servos are frequently used in low-power motors that require accurate positioning. Servos provide a way to separate motor and processor power.
PCA9685
The PCA9685 was built to control LEDs, but it can also be used with Servos and other PWM-controlled devices.
- Adafruit board for PCA9685
- Arduino with PCA9685 tutorial
- Raspberry Pi with PCA9685 with Python library
Remember to save a copy of the circuit before changing it!
Motor control
There are lots of confusing solutions out there.
- Adafruit Arduino Lesson 13 using using a TIP120
- Tom Igoe with relay or TIP120 or IRF520
- Simon Monk with an H-bridge ITP Physical Computing with H-bridge (described by Wikipedia<)
- Adafruit Motor Shield for Arduino
- RasPi Robot Board v3 by MonkMakes for Raspberry Pi