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So I'm not really the right person to answer this question however..... When I was younger I used to tinker with tiny electrical projects (from NZ so we had "D

by aidos 9y ago

So I'm not really the right person to answer this question however..... When I was younger I used to tinker with tiny electrical projects (from NZ so we had "Dick Smith" kits). I understood the very basics, but nothing complicated. As a fairly proficient software developer, real electronics has always felt alien to me. Then recently I got an Arduino, and it's opened a whole new world. It's the perfect mix of feeling like you want to glue stuff to it, and feeling like you can glue stuff to it. That one device is already full of so much interesting circuitry (with the timers and the uart and little pins waiting to ground them to make stuff happen). But the docs and libraries will guide you through it. It's like training wheels for electrical circuits.

sowbug 9y ago
Another vote for Arduino, especially if you're coming from the world of software. Your first project will be to make an LED blink, but to do that properly you need to use Ohm's Law (or else you'll forget the resistor and burn something up). Then you'll make the LED change state based on a button press, which will teach you about pull-up resistors. Eventually you'll add a modern version of a 7400 IC or two. You'll try powering too many components (likely more LEDs), and you'll discover why decoupling capacitors matter. You might even mess with a MOSFET. By this point you're a competent novice in digital electronics, and you're likely ready to start learning some of the fundamentals of analog electronics. But along the way it felt like you were just doing a bit more with software, so it was a really easy learning curve.