Tonight, Saturday 3/20/2010 – 10pm ET – “Ask an Engineer” – our weekly LIVE video chat! What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or an seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer you engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week. To see previous chat event videos, please visit the forums.

This week we’ll go through some more of chapters one of the books we stock “Make: Electronics by Charles Platt” We checked out this book before putting it in the shop, its geared towards ultimate-beginners and teaches electronics starting from basic core of analog to some digital to microcontrollers. You’ll learn tools, prototyping soldering techniques, transistors, 555’s, etc. while completing useful projects. A nice and tidy intro! This book is a good accompaniment to learning microcontrollers/Arduino in that it fills the necessary electronics theory and background.

Topics include:

• Welcome George! – He says hello
• DELAYACHRON – REPLACETHEFILTERACHRON – Backorder delay.
• Gizmodo iPad contest – sponsored by Epilog & Adafruit – enter and win!
• Finding Ada sale March 24th – Bringing women in technology to the fore
• The first Arduino ever made! (and one of the first 100!)
• Open source hardware workshop – Ladyada and Adabot talk about the OSH workshop at EYEBEAM.
• Arduino team visits Adafruit – First ever Arduino meet up in NYC (photos).

Chat details!

• Visit our new “chat” section on Adafruit at 10pm ET, Saturday nights
• Or visit our Ustream page
• For old schoolers, you can use IRC, you’ll need a Ustream log/pass, check out the Ustream IRC how-tos here and here
• We are #adafruit-industries6796 on IRC server chat1.ustream.tv
• There will be a trivia question at the end of the night as always!
• Lastly, if anyone can save a text log we’d appreciate it