Links

Other electronics sites

Robot Room	Superb hobbyist-robotics site by the author of two books on the subject. Detailed, beginner-friendly, and well written.
Seattle Robotics Society	Another excellent robotics site. The Society's newsletter, “The Encoder”, has some very interesting articles like how to do soldering with a toaster oven (June 2000).
Mike's Electric Stuff	Information about a lot of electric curiosities like vacuum tubes, very high voltage, and so on. Be sure to check out the sections about nixie tubes!
Nigel Goodwin's WinPicProg	Free Windows chip-burning software for PIC microcontrollers. Also has a very handy tutorial series, with some good fundamentals like how to use character-based LCD displays, how to read analog inputs, and so on.
The PICList	Labyrinthine but very informative site about PIC programming. Has an excellent library of member-contributed code.
Devrs.com PIC page	Another PIC hobbyist page with some useful code and links to projects. The Devrs.com site also has information about developing for other platforms.

All Electronics	Good surplus component site, sometimes has 4x20 character LCDs suitable for One Chip Video Poker.
BG Micro	Another good surplus component site. Online browsing is a bit clumsy but their print catalog is Just Like Old Times.
Digi-Key	Source for new components (i.e., not surplus). Huge selection, and if you buy stuff from them they send you telephone-book sized catalogs in the mail.
Mouser	Another new-component supplier that sends you giant catalogs. For some things their prices are better than Digi-Key's, others not.
FindChips	Search engine for several suppliers' catalogs, including Digikey and Mouser.
American Science & Surplus	Not lots in the way of electronics, but they have tons of interesting stuff and their item descriptions are hilarious.
EIO	Good place to find surplus character LCD displays, such as (again) 4x20 character LCDs suitable for One Chip Video Poker.
Timeline	I haven't ordered from these folks - they don't appear to do online ordering and their website is even more primitive than mine. So, not sure what to expect, but they do seem to have really good prices on character LCDs. Look under “Alphanumeric - Parallel Interface”.