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Why Learn Basic Electronics? [video]

• ethana 11y ago
  I took electronics classes during high school and loved it. I remember tinkering around and making blinkers and noise generators. But after I got into making websites for fun, I completely abandoned electronics as an academic route. There's part of me that wish I didn't, maybe I should get back to it as a hobby.
  • madvoid 11y ago
    It's very fun, and thanks to the hobbyist/open-source community it is more accessible than ever.
  • pjmlp 11y ago
    I had electronic and mechanical classes, followed by a technical course in programming. Web sites meant BBS login screens. So I went into a CS degree, which had shared lectures with the EE degree.
  • mellett68 11y ago
    I originally wanted to go into Electronics Engineering but I didn't take A-level maths which was a hard requirement (no surprise really, I just hadn't thought that far ahead) so fell back to Computer Science. With things like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino etc. it's actually surprisingly easy to get back in to electronics after being away from it for so long. Sure I have to look up resistor colour code tables and stuff but it's fun.
  • cellularmitosis 11y ago
    You should get back into it! Since you've left the hobby, a revolution has taken place in PCB manufacturing which allows for minimum quantities as low as 3 for the cost of a pizza or two. PCB design has truly become a hobbyist activity in the past 5 years or so.
    • wfunction 11y ago
      Would you mind pointing me to something that explains what has happened in the last 5 years that made PCB design so much cheaper? It's quite surprising to read.
      • cellularmitosis 11y ago
        Years ago, if you wanted a small PCB manufactured, your only option was to deal directly with the board manufacturer and the minimum order was 100's or 1000's of boards. Prototyping a one-off hobbyist design was totally out of the question. About 5 years ago a few startups figured out that if you played a large game of Tetris by combining the board designs of many hobbyists, you could submit the order as a single, giant PCB in a quantity of 10, or 5, or even 3. When the manufactured boards arrived, you break up the individual designs and mail them out individually to all of the hobbyists.
        • wfunction 11y ago
          Whoa, interesting, thanks!
      • amelius 11y ago
        I'm still waiting for that 3D printer that can do PCB layouts. Actually, I'm waiting for a cheap 3D printer that can print on silicon :)
        • cellularmitosis 11y ago
          In context, this comment is actually quite hilarious. Dave Jones (the guy who shoots EEVBlog) also does a podcast with Chris Gammell (who teaches Contextual Electronics). For years, Dave has been giving Chris shit over his fantasy of one day having a chip printer. Dave is certain this will never happen and absolutely delights in making fun of Chris. But all joking aside, those two guys have done great things in making electronics as a hobby accessible.
• rcknr 11y ago
  This is a great blog about electronics! I remember I needed to solder something and wasn't sure I can do it, so I searched for some tutorials on Youtube and came across this guy's series about soldering. He shows very well how easy it is to solder once you get to know a few techniques of dealing with solder and tools. And Australian accent adds an entertaining bit to it, so it's never boring.
• tlrobinson 11y ago
  Discrete electronic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors, simple ICs and sensors, etc) are sort of the "assembly language" of electronics, but the vast majority of programmers never touch assembly. There have been attempts to create higher level abstractions (like Arduino "shields", etc) but the cost (time and money) to produce reusable modules is huge relative to the cost of the components, whereas CPUs are so fast the overhead of higher level languages and function calls is usually insignificant. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe better software, and methods of manufacturing small runs of boards?
  • sklogic 11y ago
    My bet is on 3d-printing, probably used alongside with some kind of CV-assisted robotic assembly, with an HDL-based design toolchain. I'm trying to use a simple robotic manipulator to pick up and put electronic components and pour conductive paste to a 3d-printed board (while it is being printed). Trying to compensate a lack of mechanical precision with CV, sort of like what we do with our own imperfect fingers.
  • cellularmitosis 11y ago
    Perhaps a solution is reducing the friction of learning the first steps beyond assembly language? These trading cards seem to be a step in the right direction (e.g. Towards the goal of learning in a few years the kind of knowledge which the old analog wizards amassed over the course of an entire career). https://www.adafruit.com/products/1474 https://www.adafruit.com/products/1474
  • pjc50 11y ago
    Software is infinitely duplicable at zero cost. This drives a lot of its economics and society of programmers. It also means you can solve your software problems easily by adding more software. This is never going to be true of hardware. Having said that, the "shield" approach is clearly winning among the introductory and hobby market. You can buy loads of them for low cost: http://www.dx.com/p/arduno-37-in-1-sensor-module-kit-black-142834 http://www.dx.com/p/arduno-37-in-1-sensor-module-kit-black-1... Productisation is limited by regulatory effects, FCC/CE and so on.
  • 11y ago
• stevenspasbo 11y ago
  Electronics are something I've been interested in for a while, but I'm not really sure where to start. I have an arduino uno and some LEDs, but does anyone know of any good resources for beginners?
  • jeffwass 11y ago
    Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims III is a good one for a gentle introduction. But the standard bible, which is also a great source for beginners, is the Art of Electronics by Horowitz & Hill (just came out with 3rd edition). There's an associated Lab Manual which I also recommend. AoE stems from a set of lecture notes the authors used in their Physics 123 class at Harvard, which is electronics for experimentalists. I took this class in 1999, AoE was the textbook, and it was amazing. You had people across the spectrum, like psychology and music students, who in about 13 weeks learned from scratch most concepts and components of both analog and digital electronics. The pinnacle of the analog half was one lab where we designed and built a system to take an input audio signal, PWM modulate it as pulses of IR light and flash it across the room to a circuit that received, demodulated, and amplified back to audio. The second half of the class was digital electronics where we started with glue logic and ended by building a breadboard 68000 computer. We programmed it in machine code (they had available external assemblers end EEPROM burners for those of us that wanted to go further). Some students went to amazing depths beyond. Eg, in the Lab Manual they showed some student projects where they took two computer-controlled DAC's and fed them into an oscilloscope in XY mode and made games like PacMan and Asteroids. Not bad for a one-semester class of students who came in with minimal understanding of electronics.
    • kyzyl 11y ago
      If my opinion on the matter is welcome here, I would recommend against AoE. It is, indeed, the 'bible' of electronics, but it's also huge, expensive, and not terribly helpful for someone who isn't in school for electronics. Great once you know a little more, though.
      • jeffwass 11y ago
• eddd 11y ago
  He forgot about one thing though: "How to learn this stuff?" I did some very basic electronics in my CS class, but since then I didn't touch anything hardware-like. I would love to see a widely accepted and relatively short introduction to this. To me the difference between electronics and programming is that with code I can do something that works very quickly. Whereas in electronics I would have to go through the whole 900 pages book before making something that works. I might be wrong - maybe there is some path that I would take - I didn't look up very closely. And please don't say hardware is hard - General relativity theory is hard, but I manage to understand it because It is simply explained in many places over the internet.
  • klodolph 11y ago
    You probably went through 900 pages of code or textbooks before you got to your level of programming skill anyway, but you can do a lot of electronics with just, say, the first five chapters of Horowitz and Hill.
  • codesushi42 11y ago
    It's not hard to get started. Pick up Make: Electronics to learn the basics by example. Each chapter walks you through a project that teaches some important concepts. http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Platt/dp/0596153740/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434448925&sr=8-1&keywords=make+electronics http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla... And to get started with Arduino, you can simply buy a starter kit: http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Starter-Official-170-page-Projects/dp/B009UKZV0A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434448980&sr=8-1&keywords=arduino+kit http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Starter-Official-170-page-Proj... I actually think it's easier for most people to get started with electronics than with code. This is coming from someone with 13 years coding experience and who has only been working on hobby electronics for the past 2 years. Electronics projects don't have the same amount of boilerplate you see with writing code today. Development tools, frameworks, dependency management, the commandline, polyglot projects etc hinder a lot of beginners at the start. I would say you need to read 900 pages before you can fully understand everything that goes into developing a trivial CRUD website. With electronics, you just plug in and start learning. Learn the functions of a lot of different components and then come up with something that uses them together. Ohm's law is most of what you /need/ to know to design a basic circuit. You can derive what you need with the help of V=IR e.g. voltage dividers, components in series, parallel. And you need to learn how to read schematics and datasheets. The theory behind everything you do is deep if you want to venture into electromagnetism, which is IMO deeper than what you would expect from college level CS. But it's not necessary to have a deep understanding of it in practice. Though you could say the same about a lot of software engineering and its relation to CS. :)
• empressplay 11y ago
  Growing up in the 80s I had those silly "electronics kits" from Radio Shack where you ran wires between various components to do things. At the same time I was learning BASIC and LOGO and stuff -- I think they were fairly complementary. I wonder if they still make those things?
  • codesushi42 11y ago
    There are, but now they usually bundle a microcontroller like Arduino. There are tons of them on Sparkfun, Adafruit, and Jameco.
• Johnythree 11y ago
  Once upon a time, there was a huge hobby interest in Electronics. Kids were building Radios and Stereos, and then studying for their Ham license and building Transmitters, etc. Many of those kids went on to a professional career in Electronics. For a while there was huge interest in building small microprocessor systems, but then along came the desktop PC revolution and this attracted a completely different crowd. A distinct separation developed between homebrew electronics and computer hacking. The saying, "Beware computer programmers carrying a screwdriver" was only half in jest. So today the Hacker movement is starting all over again, but they seem completely unaware that a generation or two of Hardware Hackers already exists. Me, I'm retired now. I started out as a Ham radio enthusiast, later became an RF Engineer, then went on to Circuit design and PC layout, then DSP and Assembler language in Embedded systems. But towards the end of my career I found it harder and harder to find employment as manufacturing dried up. Eventually I just gave up and retired. Bottom line is that Electronics is an interesting hobby, but I wouldn't recommend it for a career. Just one further note: Lately I've been spending time in Asia: If you go into the smallest bookshop (eg in rural Thailand) you'll see local electronic magazines, complete with free kits and PCBs etc stapled on the cover. In Asia, Electronics is now a very trendy subject with schoolkids. Here, kids are labelled as "nerds" if they show an interest in any science based hobby. Perhaps that is beginning to change. I do hope so.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    The movement of the industry to Asia has certainly been bad for it in the west. I think your generation was inextricably linked with radio and audio, and the "maker" movement is much more digital. Adding computers to everything to produce little IoT devices.
  • justaman 11y ago
    I think "nerd" no longer has a negative connotation, at least not as impactful. The coolest kid in school is the kid who can get past the browser filters.
    • Vexs 11y ago
      Haha, true. Computers are so mainstream now versus the 60s-90s that being a nerd (or rather, geek) is a positive benefit in the right circumstances. They provide a service that is basically the hottest commodity around these days.
• nathan_f77 11y ago
  As a programmer, I find electronic circuits insanely hard to reason about. It's like looking at a computer program where every single line runs concurrently. Maybe I need to approach it from a different angle. But I love it, and I learned a ton when I was hacking away on my microwave [1]. [1] http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-microwave/ http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-micr...
  • amelius 11y ago
    In my experience, electronics is usually much simpler than software, because every component only talks to a few other components, you can put probes into it pretty easily, the "data" you are working with is incredibly simple (you only have voltages, currents and power). Sure, it gets more complicated with things like processor design where you have pipelines that can be flushed, and branch prediction and that kind of stuff. But that is more software than hardware anyway.
    • unwind 11y ago
      So how to you feel about analog electronics, like anything with an operational amplifier in it? Or, essentially, any circuit featuring analog feedback. Makes my brain hurt.
      • amelius 11y ago
        An opamp is just a device with fixed input/output relations. All possible configurations have already been explored to the greatest possible depth. You can find these configurations in standard textbooks. Now, turning back to software: a consensus algorithm, or a concurrent garbage collector, those are things that make my brain hurt :)
    • wyc 11y ago
      In software, you're guaranteed that 2 + 2 is perfectly 4 in an int32. It's a very clean abstraction. In hardware, operational amplifiers are affected by thermal noise, magnetic fields, parasitic capacitance, etc. It is not "incredibly simple", and although there are only a handful of inputs you /want/ to care about in that operational amplifier, the actual number of inputs you have to worry about increases dramatically as you chase performance, higher frequencies, and compactness. Processors must implement logic that can be represented by software, yes. However, when you're trying to push multiple GHz on nanometer technology, that implementation becomes especially difficult. I recommend picking up an RF engineering book, as it will only begin to describe the noise and side-effects that must be accounted for in those circumstances. There's a reason that Intel has physicists on staff. If hardware was truly easier than software, then we'd probably be building our web and mobile apps in that.
• metaprinter 11y ago
  I've been working with http://www.snapcircuits.net/ http://www.snapcircuits.net/ Snap Circuits with my kids since they were 4years old. The lessons they learned there are used to this date and i think invaluable, especially now that they are trying to get things to move and light up using an arduino. I recommend checking out their kits, they can be used all the way up to HS level, heck I still like using them and showing them off to other parents.
• jilted 11y ago
  Agree with Johnythree. I used to be an electronics technician over 12 years ago. What happened is that it became cheaper to replace a board than to pay a skilled technician to debug components on a board. You also had to pretty much learn whatever setup a company's products had on the job, as typically this was proprietary information. There are great boards/kits out today but yes, it's mostly a hobbyist thing unless you decide to go embedded, then boards such as the MSP-430 from Texas Instruments can be a good choice (especially in the Medical Devices field).
• vvanders 11y ago
  Dave Jones is great. I've found that learning about FPGAs and DDR access timings/commands was really a crystallizing in understanding why there are pipelines, cache misses and how to wring out real performance from a system.
• gshrikant 11y ago
  I feel another reason why discrete electronics isn't as 'trendy' now as it was before, is because of how products seem to be 'seamlessly integrated' nowadays. There is nothing to take apart or repair. A side benefit of hobbyist electronics was the ability to repair broken electronics lying around the house (simple radios, alarms and what-not). With stuff increasingly becoming a single 'product' instead of an assembly of discrete pieced together parts - both in terms of their circuits and their mechanical construction, there is little incentive for that kind of exploratory learning.