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A little rant about the beginner's tutorials for the Arduino: I'm trying (or was trying) to get into the Arduino/electronics stuff but by far my biggest proble
by leon_ 15y ago
A little rant about the beginner's tutorials for the Arduino:
I'm trying (or was trying) to get into the Arduino/electronics stuff but by far my biggest problem is not the super easy subset of C++ they use in their IDE (hell, most of the time you don't need pointers) but the electronics stuff.
Pushdown/Pullup/Voltage dividers, RC circuits, etc. All that fundamental electronics stuff is never discussed in depth. They give you a circuit schematic with let's say a voltage divider and a temperature sensor and tell you: "That's the schematic and that's how you do it. That thing on the left is called a voltage divider. It divides voltage. And now for the hard part: for-loops and Serial.println()"
Is there no beginner stuff for people who know how to code but are puzzled by the electronics part? Where they explain you why you have to put a voltage divider into the circuit and what it exactly does.
Maybe I'm just ultra stupid and all the other people reading those tutorials get an instant grasp of the circuits used and are really hold back by for-loops and curly braces. Or my method is just wrong and I shouldn't try to understand everything. Just copy circuits found on the internet and be happy?
(Yes, I'm reading electronics textbooks - sadly they are not that easy to understand for casual learning on the weekends.)
- timclark 15y agoWhat level are you looking at? Is the content of something like this http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9780596153748 http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9780... too simple?
- leon_ 15y agoI got my "enlightenment" some time ago - I think I understand now the very basics of electronics. But my fundamental problem was to understand why circuits were built the way they were. Like the example of the thermic resistor used to measure room temperature. At first I had no idea why the out line to the controller's pin had to be put between 2 resistors (one being the sensor). The tutorial I followed mentioned only that it's called a voltage divider - but that was it. (In hindsight this is really a most basic concept - but at that time it was confusing to me.) I read a few books on that subject since then but playing with http://www.falstad.com/circuit/ http://www.falstad.com/circuit/ ultimately helped me the most. I just wish there were some simple explanations of these concepts. (As simple as explaining the basics of programming.)
- timclark 15y agoI guess that the basic circuits should be documented in exactly the same way as we would document basic code examples for beginners.