Show HN: I wrote a book on practical electronics design

by blueintegral • 5 years ago

97 14 5 years ago

The author, Hunter Scott, has been working on everything from plants to farming on Mars to long-distance wireless power-charging electronics.

I spent the last decade tinkering with software/hardware projects. This book is exactly what I wish I had when diving in.

Note: I have no connection to the book. I just really like the author's work.

Edit: The digital book is free.

throwaway81523• 5 years ago

It's pick-your-price with no minimum, so there is imo some shaming involved if you actually specify $0 and download it for free. That makes advertising it as a free download a little bit iffy. Also, they want your email address for the download.

The book does sound promising though I really liked the 2nd edition of Horowitz and Hill back in the day (I haven't seen the new 3rd ed. yet). It seems like a tough act to follow.

Added: looks like the book is a 110MB download that you have to download with a browser (javascript link). Can't use wget. Any chance of a direct link to a pdf?

Added: I've spent a few minutes flipping through, and it looks like a very practical book whose subject matter is nothing at all like what I expected (e.g. like Horowitz and Hill). There's nothing about Ohm's Law or transistor gains or anything like that. It's about how to build and test shippable electronic products: that is, you can already design and build the gadget on your workbench, but now you have to get it ready for manufacture, testing, etc. It warns you to take Chinese New Year into account if you're working with contract manufacturers in China, etc.

It's a normal-looking PDF of about 300 pages containing seemingly normal text (there might be some diagrams here and there). I have no idea why it's 110MB instead of say 1MB. On today's computers it is still manageable, but it's yet more bloat.

Aditya_Garg• 5 years ago

The author himself is advertising the digital copy as free on his website.

the__alchemist• 5 years ago

Sweet - bought!

I'm surprised the digital version is a PDF instead of EPUB etc. Surprising decision.

Ma8ee• 5 years ago

I prefer PDFs for technical literature. Well, everything with tables and or figures, or side notes that needs to align reasonably with the main content. Most other formats tend to mess up on or more of the above.

jasonrodrigues• 5 years ago

This is awesome. Great work, Hunter. Love the practicality and relatable language used. This should help demystify things for a lot of people attempting to understand and appreciate electronic design.

mikewarot• 5 years ago

I started reading, sent some money. Looks great!

timetc• 5 years ago

Nice! This sounds awesome, definitely going checking this out. A topic I want to dive in for a long time, but I did not know where to start.

I especially like the sound of it being practical and centered around creating a product. Thanks :)

jpindar2• 5 years ago

I love the idea of having a Discord for the book.

sahilsat• 5 years ago

Its a great practical idea. Thank you

sleepybodo2• 5 years ago

I’ve been wanting to dive into electronics recently as a hobby because I write code all day and would like to work with something similar but physical. Although I’ve identified plenty of excellent sources to learn from, for me, it’s still a case of a solution looking for a problem. Can anyone point me to examples of the sorts of things electronics hobbyists build? Not interested in kits, really. I've been searching for examples of someone who identified a problem and built a solution to solve it.

jpindar2• 5 years ago

There's some examples on Hackaday, also Adafruit has a livestream where people show off their projects.

https://hackaday.com/ and https://hackaday.io/

https://www.adafruit.com/

sleepybodo2• 5 years ago

Thank you!

cryptoized• 5 years ago

This is worth reading, I will go back and make a payment.

Nice work Hunter!

Show HN: I wrote a book on practical electronics design

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