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Comment by kevindeasis | Hacker News Reader

A question that comes often from a bunch of young people is that they ask me about where to start learning about hardware, soldering, leading into networking (TCP/IP, BGP, etc).

I don't really know how to answer their question.

Does anyone know what I should tell them for future reference if these things keep coming up?

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Tron Club[0] is a monthly subscription service that delivers a bag of parts, including battery and breadboard, and a very nicely done booklet that shows twenty odd circuits to build that month. Each circuit page in the booklet shows a real life photo of the completed breadboard next to the schematic diagram for the same circuit, which is amazing for connecting the abstract to the physical. After a year, they promise to have delivered 350+ circuits. Each month's kit has an area on their forum for help if you get stuck. I'm planning to do them with a nephew.

[0] http://tronclub.com/

Arduino is the de facto starting place for new hobbyists. It's a very low barrier to entry and runs on pretty much anything.

If you want to learn networking at an Internet of Things level, look at the Spark Photon (basically an ARM dev board with a TI CC3000 WiFi module). It's only $19. The documentation is fantastic, hence I would recommend it over say the ESP2866 which is super cheap but a bit more... hacky.

I think they actually switched away from the TI CC3000 module with the Photon because it had some quite severe, unfixable firmware issues.

A good place to start is an Arduino [1], and connect a button, sensors, actuators to play with.

When you want to move more into networking, step up to the Raspberry Pi [2], which runs Linux and also includes digital GPIO pins.

[1] https://www.arduino.cc/

[2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/

I find it curious that people besides network engineers want to know what BGP is. Maybe because BGP kind of rolls of the tongue vs something like ITU-T Y.1564

As a teen, I always liked to read the Elektor magazine. They had a nice mix of beginner-friendly articles, plus more advanced ones to keep up the motivation.

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