BEAM Reference Library Links:
Electronics & skills tutorials
John Adams' Basic
Electronics, and "Professor V"'s Basic
Electronics mini-course are both good introductions
to electronics. Ray Miecznik has a slew of basic
electronic tutorials here.
A British electronics club called 4QD has a writeup for
electricity to water. And Alex Pounds has an
electronics tutorial site here.
Meanwhile, there's also a Yahoo club (TRCY) that has some
tutorial material here.
As for skills, to build any BEAMbot, you'll first have
to learn how
to solder; if you've never soldered before, be
patient -- this is one of those skills that takes some
practice to perfect..
You should also learn how
to desolder -- we all make mistakes from time to
time, and at the very least, you'll need this skill in
order to salvage electronics parts from
If you want to build your own printed circuit board,
and you have room for some development gear, Mike Harison
has a page on Making
PCBs via photolithography.
Iguana Labs hosts an excellent page on Learning
to use Transistors and LEDs.
Stein has an excellent tutorial on building up a gear
motor from a salvaged "walkman" motor and KTU
BEAM basics tutorials
Sebastiaan van Vleet has a tutorial
for the H-bridge, and elsewhere, a BEAM
Craig Maynard has a Chloroplast
Solar Engine tutorial.
There are photopopper
tutorials-a-plenty out on the web. Ben Hitchcock has a
Chiu-Yuan Fang's photopopper
tutorial is here,
and Ian Bernstein has one here.
"Andy's light-seeking robots" has a pictorial tutorial on
building a FRED-based photopopper
A "step by step" tutorial on Symets
Tom Mairs also has one up in his "Robotics
Ben Hitchcock, the "father" of the Fred solar
engine and photopopper,
has a tutorial on building a Fred photopopper
More-advanced BEAM tutorials
A fist-full of walker tutorials are available.
The original Andrew Miller 2-motor walker tutorial is
hosted by Bram Van Zolen here;
my simplified version is here.
Meanwhile, Chiu-Yuan Fang has his own "Miller" walker
van Vleet has a good tutorial on free-forming a
master / slave bicore 2-motor walker circuit here
(be warned, though, this page so far only works in
Wilf's power smart head tutorial is at BEAM
Andy Pang has a tutorial on a bicore-based (less
efficient than Wilf's power smart head) head circuit
Jim Mullins has a tutorial on building an "aquapod"
(submergeable drive pod) here
BEAMnet has an article on Bicores
van Vleet has a tutorial on 2-motor walker balance
and leg design here.
Tektronix has a tutorial on oscilloscopes
For more information...
Ian Bernstein's excellent BEAM
Online has a whole list of tutorials
to choose from.