Why Learn Basic Electronics? [video]

http://www.eevblog.com/2015/05/27/eevblab-10-why-learn-basic-electronics

by gbugniot • 11 years ago

156 55 11 years ago

ethana• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

It's very fun, and thanks to the hobbyist/open-source community it is more accessible than ever.

pjmlp• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

cellularmitosis4• 11 years 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.

wfunction2• 11 years 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.

rcknr• 11 years 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.

tlrobinson2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

cellularmitosis4• 11 years 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

pjc502• 11 years 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-1...

Productisation is limited by regulatory effects, FCC/CE and so on.

amelius5• 11 years ago

Discrete electronic components are sort of the "assembly language" of electronics

Yes, but to make the analogy more realistic, it is an assembly language for a relatively simple and very slow and inefficient, power-consuming processor.

Nowadays, with discrete electronics components, one unfortunately cannot make fast and lean electronics like any of the big companies are making.

vvanders2• 11 years ago

If you're using discrete components for digital processor, sure.

However they still have a very real application in the analog domain(along with a strong understanding of discrete ICs like Opamps and Transistors).

minthd2• 11 years ago

There are plenty of interesting electronic technologies offering programmability at a reasonable price :

Xmos is offering low cost microcontroller family where you can program your digital peripherals in c. So are others.

Cypress is offering programmable analog chips. Very versatile.

There are extremely low cost fpgas.

To is offering an mcu with programmable wireless protocols, currently only by them but maybe there's hope.

For users interfaces, the phone offers a great users interface, if made accessible like simblee promises.

So basically there are lots of option available but what is missing is ease of use and maybe options to combine them together.

tlrobinson2• 11 years ago

Microcontrollers alone don't let you do anything a PC can't do, you need to couple them with sensors, UI, and IO.

jononor• 11 years ago

We need compilers, high-level languages and 'linkers'. A way to represent module interfaces, allowing multiple module implementations: from a ready-made board (like an Arduino shield), to an 'optimized' piece of an integrated board for whole system. A package manager to easily download and integrate such modules into ones project...

stevenspasbo• 11 years 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?

jeffwass4• 11 years 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.

kyzyl3• 11 years 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.

kyzyl3• 11 years ago

It really depends on where you want to go with it. I found early on that I learned most by figuring out how to achieve self contained blocks of functionality to accomplish a more elaborate task. For example, to build a tape following robot you need to run the motors, read some IR sensors, implement some kind of PID control, build some kind of regulated power supply, etc. (I learned least from solving circuit problems out of a textbook).

Each of those tasks can pretty well be accomplished by building standalone circuits, none of which are particularly complicated. In the process of building and debugging each one, you'll find you need to figure out how some of the more basic building blocks of electronics work, for example, capacitors, LEDs, opamps, transistors. There are a huge amount of resources out there to learn from. For anything related to arduinos or microcontrollers, just google it. I don't mean to sound condescending, it really is something that can be googled very easily with relatively high quality results (unlike some other areas of electronics, such as analog amplifier design). For some more theoretical stuff, I suggest you check out MIT OpenCourseware as well as video lectures from Standford on youtube. I blundered my way through a physics degree and an electrical engineering degree using those sites. For a more gentle introduction to some electronics concepts and applications, maybe check out this: http://electronics.wisc-online.com/Category.aspx?ID=3

Now the bad news. You can do a lot of futzing around with arduinos and leds, and that's great, but you'll soon find out that it's interaction with sensors and actuators that makes electronics interesting. To do that you will find that you need to build/use external 'hard' circuits, and to do that you will eventually need an oscilloscope. You really can't get too far in the field without one, even if it's just a hacked sound card and audio cable. I say 'bad news' because a new benchtop scope is pretty expensive. A breadboard, some wires and a soldering iron don't hurt either ;-) For components and data sheets, digikey.com and octopart.com are your friends. For breakout boards and other hobbyist accessories, sparkfun.org and adafruit.com are your friends. There's also a arduino plugin for sublimetext, in case you're like me and can't stand using that atrocious java UI.

emilburzo• 11 years ago

After I bought my first Arduino, I did the pulsating LED tutorial, put it in a box and that was it.

Then, by accident, I found a "37 sensor kit" for Arduino on dx.com, and that was a game changer.

And I think that's the problem with getting hooked: pulsating LEDs are fun for a few seconds, robots are interesting but waaay too complex for starting out, but just having some sensors and simple tasks (measure the temperature, send it to another arduino hooked up to a PC, store the data, make a pretty web page and voila you have ambient info) is better.

whizse• 11 years ago

Make: Electronics is a great introduction and a lot of fun. http://www.makershed.com/products/make-electronics-book

reidrac• 11 years ago

I liked reading it but I think I made a mistake getting it for Kindle instead the paper version; I'm not good using the ebook reader for reference material.

The projects are OK-ish, though. Still a good book.

eddd• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

codesushi423• 11 years 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-Pla...

And to get started with Arduino, you can simply buy a starter 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. :)

codesushi423• 11 years ago

BTW if you are interested in learning some of the theory, check out Practical Electronics for Inventors:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Paul-S...

minthd2• 11 years ago

I think it's easy to start in (some) software, if you pick the right tools. For example, micrososft lightswitch is great for beginners who want to build a CRUD website.The only problem - it's expensive.

Simlarly, nutonian/big-ml is great for machine learning, and gamemaker or ms-spark are great for games, and for websites there are many tools ,be it CMS's or others that help.

But i agree , general website design is far too complex.

CamperBob2• 11 years ago

If Horowitz & Hill doesn't do it for you, try the ARRL Handbook. They are both good learning resources, but are very different in style and content.

The way to learn electronics is much like the way to learn programming. Come up with something you want to make, then work incrementally through whatever educational barriers stand in your way. You can put the "education" part first, but you may have trouble connecting the dots in real life. Better to just dive in.

empressplay• 11 years 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?

codesushi423• 11 years ago

There are, but now they usually bundle a microcontroller like Arduino. There are tons of them on Sparkfun, Adafruit, and Jameco.

Johnythree• 11 years 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.

pjc502• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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-micr...

amelius5• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

wyc• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

I've been working with 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• 11 years 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).

vvanders2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

Why Learn Basic Electronics? [video]

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