Basic Electronics for Tomorrow's Inventors

CHAPTER 18 Heads or Tails? Flip an Electronic Coin

FOR SOME GAMES, YOU FLIP A COIN to see which player starts first. Each player shouts “Heads!” or “Tails!” to predict which side of the coin will face up before the coin is flipped—each player has a 50/50 chance of winning the coin toss. But a coin has no electronics inside! As an inventor, you want to find a way of creating an electronic circuit that does the same thing. This experiment shows you how to build it.

If you haven’t built the random number generator experiment in Chapter 17, you should do so before starting this experiment. The electronic coin uses a lot of the core electronic circuitry ...