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Arduino!

• holgersindbaek 14y ago
  That's an answer I can understand :-). Where would you start with Arduino then? Any links?
  • rabidsnail 14y ago
    http://wiring.org.co/learning/tutorials/index.html http://wiring.org.co/learning/tutorials/index.html http://fritzing.org/learning/tutorials/ http://fritzing.org/learning/tutorials/
    • holgersindbaek 14y ago
      Awesome... thanks. Is there any well known forums for hardware hackers. Like StackOverflow, just for Hardware?
      • HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
        There is electronics.stackexchange.com, but it's probably a bit premature at this point. When you say you "want to learn hardware" how much do you want to learn? Saying you started with RoR and showing that speaker thing as an end project, I'll assume you want to start at a pretty high level. The easy, inexpensive way of putting together high level "hardware building blocks" is Arduino. Head over to SparkFun or adafruit Industries and find lots of beginning hardware hackers in their forums. You'll get all the help you want there. For a more HelloWorld.c approach, if you want to learn digital (let's ignore analog for now) electronics at a more elemental level, I'd say purchase a breadboard, a handful of CMOS chips and passive components (or get a kit from Make) and flash an LED, or make some electronic music and experiment from there. One way isn't "better" than the other; they just approach the problem from different viewpoints.
        • holgersindbaek 14y ago
          I want to learn enough to be able to create what I want to create. So if I have an idea for a speaker for Mac-devices, then I want to be able to do it or have the knowledge, so I know what I need to learn to do it. Starting doing back-end development can be a bit of a challenge. How much of a challenge do you think it is to start with Hardware, compared to that?
          • HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
            "Hardware" is such an open ended subject that the question can't be answered reasonably. Hardware encompasses everything from interplanetary spacecraft communications to electrical power generation and then some. Again, it depends on what you want to do. Just like software, electrical engineering has many specialties and sub-specialties. You can build things from individual basic components (think of this as assembly or C programming) or wire modules together (CRUD plumbing). I don't know the first thing about Macs but if I assume you mean that you want to be able to connect external speakers to the line-level audio output of a Mac, you should understand the basics of wiring and building circuits. Pehaps look online for an LM386 project. Not much theory involved in doing it that way, just learning how to read schematic diagrams and solder circuits.