I managed to learn all this stuff by playing around with a breadboard and Arduino first. Sparkfun, AdaFruit + Arduino have a lot of beginner tutorials. The fir

I managed to learn all this stuff by playing around with a breadboard and Arduino first. Sparkfun, AdaFruit + Arduino have a lot of beginner tutorials. The first tutorial with Arudino will teach you how to light up an LED. Then figure out switches. Then look into motors and play around with other things like temperature, buzzers, etc. Once you do a few of these tutorials everything just clicks together. It's really just sending 1s (current) and 0s (ground) through the wires. You'll learn that you can essentially break apart anything like a scale or a clock and just tap into the electrical connectors.