The Internet is a venue for exchanging information, goods, and services. As a designer, you search the Internet on a daily basis for the hardware, software, and information you need to bring your projects to completion. In exchange, you often provide companies, organizations, and other designers with payments, contact information, and advice of your own. With each exchange, however, comes risk. Is the blog you’re reading about that new line of MCUs truly reliable? Did the designer you’re in contact with vet his code for bugs? Is that free software download riddled with glitches or infected with a virus? The upside to taking such risks is that you just might find what you’re looking for. The downside is that you might receive the kind of shoddy code or bad advice that could destroy a project.

My brother recently took a similar risk when he bought a refurbished DVD player on a “one deal, one day” type of web site for about $200 less than the unit’s original sticker price. Before he bought the unit, he had learned from a blogger that there was a known defect in the unit’s firmware that was causing DVDs to skip and occasionally freeze. The blogger had said, however, that the marked-down system was still a good buy for an IT-savvy consumer willing to upgrade the DVD player’s firmware on his own. After weighing the pros and cons, my brother bought the system.

A few weekends ago, the worst-case scenario played itself out. We were riding out a rainy Saturday with pizza and flicks when one of the movies began to skip. Rather than huff and puff about the problem, my brother shot into action. Fortunately, it didn’t take him long to download the firmware (provided by the manufacturer and posted on the blogger’s web site), load it on a CD, and pop it into the DVD player. In a matter of minutes, the system was working perfectly. 

My brother was comfortable with the amount of risk he was assuming by purchasing a problematic DVD player and relying on a stranger to supply him with a solution to the problem. But when it comes to an important project on your workbench, just how much of your time and money are you willing to put on the line?

A great thing about Circuit Cellar is that we help take the risk out of the equation for designers working on projects that are confined by tight deadlines and budgets. Take the recent Atmel contest. You know that when you read through the winners’ entries, you will be dealing with the work of serious engineers who put a lot of time and energy into their designs and code. These entries are great points of reference for future projects.

As for our editorial content, well, you already know that you’re getting the best of the best. When you set out to design, say, your own version of Dale Wheat’s Video13 system (p. 12), you have at your side a step-by-step guide written with a reader’s needs in mind. If you’re interested in power over Ethernet technology, you can follow Eddie Insam’s advice (p. 60) and then refer to the documents listed at the end of his article for more information. All of the supplementary information is included for your benefit.  

Another indispensable resource is the code we post on our web site. If you want to build a color STN display (p. 30), you’re free to peruse Dejan Durdenic’s code as you map out the flow of your own. You can do the same for many of the other projects covered in this issue.

The message here is to use all of Circuit Cellar’s resources as you work on your projects. Be sure to let me know how you do!

cj@circuitcellar.com