Show HN: Learn how to build electronics with monthly kits | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Learn how to build electronics with monthly kits

thimble.io

272 pointsadammunich112 comments

I like the idea of an electronics kit with instructions.

But (and I'm sorry if this sounds negative but I'm just FED UP) I'm so SICK of freaking subscription services. Can't you guys just rely on interested customers coming back if they want to? The way I see it, there's absolutely no relation between the message you have on the site to teach people electronics and make a few bucks while you're at it, and the need for customers to have accounts, registration, subscription and all of that crap. Just let me buy the kit I'm interested in and be done with it! With so many subscription services around, I'm following a policy of immediately disregarding anything following the same model, specially if there's really no need for it. Make a one-time purchase option, with no registration or crappy spammy emails and I'd be interested (yes i know you won't share my details with 3rd party but you'll hammer me with emails on every freaking occasion I know.)

Ability to buy multiple kits on demand = requirement for inventory = higher overhead = higher prices. Theoretically. You can tweak the inventory need but that still increases overhead (less) while simultaneously cutting into your margins.

Any time you see "$400 value for $10/mo!" it's marketing garbage, but you really can get for $20/mo what would probably cost you $25 or a little more if you bought it on-demand.

I'm okay with that extra 5 bucks for their inventory cost if they allow me to opt out of permanently saving my details on their servers. No matter how many times I unsubscribe from their emails, they always start a new list and I'm strangely on it again.

Adafruit has some great kits, if you intrested. https://www.adafruit.com/category/203

Thanks. Yes I'm familiar with the great stuff on Adafruit. Unfortunately though since I'm not based in the US, It always amounts to more than what the item would be worth considering customs in Sweden and shipping cost.

Was thinking the same thing. Businesses are saying let's milk the elearning space with subscriptions. No visibility into the projects or anything. Tap on a subscription and you are immediately presented with a $100 add on for a soldering iron some clips, and $20 worth of goods.

Nope.

Agree. Also not wanting to pick on this particular project but:

I have burned myself - and seen others got burned - too many times on subscriptions.

Feature keys? Thumbs up. Commercial with 15 days trial? Fine. Pay for online storage? Only if you provide a better alternative than Dropbox, Google or AWS. Monthly payment for static apps? Bad. Creating an online experience (syncing in your proprietary "cloud") to justify monthly payments? Yuck.

I want my apps to work without constantly having to pay a protection fee to a vendor.

This of course goes against what every make-a-SAAS-tutorial will tell you but I am speaking here as a consumer :-]

I think the thing that bothers me more about the subscription plans right now is that I don't have an expectation of what I am going to get for the first few months. There is no schedule, no 'theme' or anything like that listed on the OP but I feel (recently) that every time I am presented with a new subscription service I have no idea what I am getting even the next month, which defeats the point.

My issue with learning electronics is that there's a steep gap between "plug this into that" and "plug this into that because x". I want to learn how to reason about the latter. Most resources I've seen like this don't give you that, they just have a bunch of prefab projects and lead you through them with the former strategy. Fortunately I've been able to learn some of the latter on my own but it would be great to see a good resource for the former.

I know how to program. I don't want to program a microcontroller to do all of the work. I don't want to build a "WiFi robot", I want to build a simple circuit with a few LEDs and understand completely how it works and why it was designed that way. I want to know how to choose the right batteries and resistors, or what components I need for arbitrary projects.

Check out "Engineers Mini Notebook" series by Forrest M Mims III

So, get yourself a cheap arduino and an arduino circuits book.

Then look up each component and look at videos relating to them (most of them will include the technicals)

These kits are more for children in the software/hardware space.

I wouldn't recommend any uC to a newbie without first giving him/her a grasp of digital electronics using basic logic chips such as the 74xx/40xx families. My advice would be to learn the basics of binary math and how logic gates work, then get the CMOS and TTL cookbooks by Don Lancaster and start experimenting. On the analog side I also would recommend the books by Mims and later the obvious TAoE.

I recommend The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill.

I'm an electrical engineer and in my experience most EE courses are very math heavy. This is because the theory behind electronics is very math heavy. Many people don't enjoy doing math problems in their spare time, though. The thing is that after you get past the theory and into the practice, the math mostly drops away as you learn abstractions and little tricks to aid in designing circuits. I like The Art of Electronics because it has the math there if you need it, but assumes you didn't get past Algebra. It mostly leads with the abstractions and little tricks that you would use to design circuits with a just a pen and paper.

Some people find it tedious, though. My advice is not to read it cover to cover. Read the parts that interest you and use the rest as a reference.

I'll second the recommendation, it does a great job of not only covering things but explaining why you'd use certain components and the engineering trade-offs required(the section on transistors is fantastic). It's old but still very relevant today.

If I remember correctly they even go from transistor up to building an entire 8-bit micro in addition to the excellent analog reference.

As someone who isn't an EE I found it still very straightforward to follow if a bit dense(in a good way) in some sections.

I started in EE in college and ended up switching to CpE (Computer Engineering, which basically was 60/40 CS/EE) because I found I liked the programming slightly more than the EE side of things.

I still find the book a tad dense at times but it's absolutely a must have for anyone that cares more about the why than the how. As said above, this is a fantastic reference book, you will likely never read this cover to cover unless you're following it as instruction material for a class.

Anymore these days, with all the breakouts and instructables a person could very likely get by with know whether something needs 5v or 3.3v (if that).

I feel like these monthly subscriptions are good for a while for someone who wants to get into the hobby and has ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where to start. You get the inspiration, materials, and help specifically for the task at hand without all the other noise.

I have a feeling that after a few months if the person is still keenly interested they wouldn't need the subscription anymore and I'd be surprised if most subscribers stayed on past 6-9 months because of this (or the opposite).

Would it pay off to get the lab book Learning The Art of Electronics too?

https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Art-Electronics-Hands-Course...

Yes. I have both, they are often recommended together. Get both and start doing the Lab Course. Refer to the Art when needed. Once you've done the Lab book you can re-read the Art to fill in the gaps. I recon you need about 15 months worth of leisurely evenings to do it justice.

Cool beans thought so but wanted to be sure before I blew that much money. :)

I asked an EE about that but got warned it's more like a reference book. He said the easiest book on electronics he ever saw was a Malvino book he stumbled on in a thrift store. I found one of its editions for $2 on Amazon. Great balance of explaining the basics, showing math, and practical advice of do's & don't.

https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Simulation-Albe...

Also just found this. Use it as backup copy if you buy the book.

http://www.talkingelectronics.com/Download/Malvino_Electroni...

There may be better electronics books out there, but one that I've found very helpful is Electronic Components -- A complete Reference for Project Builders by Delton T. Horn (1992). It explains enough of the theory of how the various components work to get a reasonable intuition, but it also describes the various kinds of those components that are available and why one might be better than another for some particular application.

https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Components-Complete-Refere...

A very good start would be MIT's 6.002x via edX. It's currently offered in 3 parts, all self-paced:

https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-1-basic-circ...

https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-2-amplificat...

https://www.edx.org/course/circuits-electronics-3-applicatio...

I think in this case The book practical electronics for inventors / Paul Scherz McGraw-Hill would be a winner.

Seconding the recommendation for Practical Electronics for Inventors as a comprehensive and self-contained book for learning electronics at a hobbyist level.

Art of Electronics is also a good book but needs to be read with a discerning eye to place everything in the appropriate context: some sections are important, some are premature optimization for hobby-level projects, and some are flat out obsolete. I feel it's better used as a reference book than read cover to cover.

Also worth playing around with the Falstad circuit simulator: http://www.falstad.com/circuit/

And there are lots of good app notes out there from the manufacturers. (http://www.ti.com/ww/en/bobpease/assets/AN-31.pdf is a classic.)

Mine as well.

I've been doing it as a VERY light hobby now for a few years (maybe building a little thing every few months or so, using an ESP8266 here and there). I still don't quite get where the hell they are getting the amount of resistance needed, or why this capacitor is needed here, etc...

I still haven't found any good resources that are between "plug x into y" and "read the whitepages for every component you will use and figure it out yourself". Most "advanced" tutorials/guides will just throw equations at you and say something like "you need to use this equation to figure out your resistance" but never why it's that equation, or why i should use that over the other one, or what situations that will apply to, or where they got the magic number they plugged into it.

I want to gain the "intuition" (probably not the right word) to know when I need to use this equation, where I'll need resistance at all, when it might be a good idea to have a capacitor. I know what each does on a basic level, i just need that next level of understanding.

I very strongly second this - I have the same problem. Once or twice a year I'll fiddle around and build something small - but I have serious trouble getting an intuitive grasp on how everything interacts at a high level. It's often a lot of trial and error for me, and while enjoyable, the lack of good learning material has seriously hampered the amount of projects I've attempted.

Could you give a specific example?

Sometimes ICs require external passives with specific values (e.g. a 1uF ceramic on pin 3), but you'll never really understand why those values because the chip is a black box to you. Usually you have to place external components because they would be too large to design onto the die itself, particularly large things like capacitors and inductors. As such their value is whatever the manufacturer says it should be and you go along with it. Often the most magical component requirements are found in RF circuits, and then you may as well go with what the manufacturer recommends because the designers probably simulated it first.

That said, I would guess you're talking about things where various combinations of components would work - e.g. a voltage divider, do you use 1R/10R or 1kR/100kR? That particular example is explained quite well [here](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/28897/how-to-...).

There are a lot of good book suggestions but I'll toss out an alternative idea of buying "bad" kits. Kits that just take care of one task. Maybe its the RF guts of a 30M ham radio receiver that barely technically works. Now you get to spend engineering effort on the somewhat simpler tasks of making a decent source of regulated noise free power, and build a decent AF amp strong enough to turn the headphones level audio into something driving a speaker using a couple transistors (or maybe an IC). And the input filtering isn't very good so you get to design a nice 10Mhz or so bandpass filter wide enough to let most of the receiver bandwidth thru but block enough interference signals especially AM radio transmitters. And now input signal levels are going to be low enough that a dedicated class A RF amp on the input might be a good idea to boost signals. Next thing you know you're going to be unhappy with the frequency stability of the VFO, so you either rig one of dozens of DDS VFO kits in its place or stabilize the free running VFO in the kit.

Anyway the point is if you can regulate power and build amplifiers and filters but not quite up to the level of building a 30M radio receiver, then improving a bad kit would be a good plan.

Likewise if your "wifi robot" you don't want is close source silo 100% maxed out no expansion possible it is quite useless. But if its got an IO pin or two and you want to learn how to light LEDs using resistors and maybe a transistor or two, you can use the wifi robot to handle the whole "how to turn it on and off" part while you focus on the source vs sink current limits and the excitement of inverting transistor driver circuits and the virtues of putting the LED in the collector or emitter circuit (assuming bipolar transistor) or the joys of trying to bias different types of switching FET transistors, oh its all a barrel of fun but by leveraging the unwanted "wifi robot" you can avoid some hassle.

Also note that the "maker community" of java programmers learning to solder and the ham radio community of EEs learning to program java, never ever cross pollinate. However I live in both camps and the ham radio guys have decades of "learn you some electronics for greater good" general category of book. So if you're not having much luck with the maker style books there are literal decades of the ham radio branch "learn electronics" books. Check the ARRL to start.

That's exactly what Gammel claimed to do in his original videos on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260343

He pointed out that the classes were usually theory heavy where you do piles of math without building anything. He said the kits normally had you plug stuff up without understanding what's going on. So, he tried to do a course that was incremental and build-oriented like kits but gave you understanding of theory/concepts a bit at a time. I haven't used the service but it was only one that claimed to do this.

Try Practical Electronics for Inventors:

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Third...

> I want to build a simple circuit with a few LEDs and understand completely how it works and why it was designed that way.

Once you get bored by "battery plus LED" circuits, I recommend Nibbler 4 bit CPU [1] and transistor clock [2]. They are sufficiently complex to be impressive and hone your EE skills, yet simple enough to still finish even if you're not really an EE. They also can be understood completely, there are no secrets and all design decisions are explained in the documentation.

[1] http://bigmessowires.com/nibbler [2] http://transistorclock.com

Step 1: Buy Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mims, or any other book by him. Step 2: Build all the projects in his books. You'll only need a proto board and a few other cheap components.

You'll build up an intuition in electronics by doing all these projects. If you want to throw a microcontroller in the mix, get the cheap TI MSP430 Launchpad- it's about $5, and you can use C or Arduino.

I have to agree...this is WAY overpriced. I could see spending $50-75 for the first kit maybe, which would include the more expensive parts that you'll be reusing later, then $20-25 a month after that, but $720 -$1080 for a year??? That's just insane. Any profit they're gaining from the high prices is costing them in lost volume.

I think what you pay for is not components, they have learning platform and tutorials and probably customer support.

Which means they lose the instant people realize they can DIY for a fraction of what they charge

But people like to pay for convenience, and this is convenient. You pay a monthly fee to receive a predetermined project, all the parts necessary to build it, an entire walk through equipped with videos/photo, and customer support.

Sure the price is inflated (for someone with the know-how) but for people interested in learning electronics, the all-in-one-delivered-monthly is a great sell until you grow out of it.

> Step 1: Buy Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mims

This is the defacto book for beginners but I've never really been able to parse the format. I've gone through a lot of books and none seem to match the approach (gently, less formal) with some formatting that is easy to ingest.

I do love the Launchpads, and they were a ton of fun to use (the IDE is a beast, though). I'd say starting with Arduino or a Pi before a microcontroller is a natural step for beginners, though.

Arduinos are microcontrollers... but I get what you're saying, a more beginner-friendly microcontroller stack.

You can run Arduino sketches on Launchpads, fyi.

An esp8266 Arduino Uno form factor breakout is even cheaper ($3.6 shipped), and comes with wifi, and works with the extraordinarily simple Arduino IDE (and all of the related libraries, tutorials, etc)

An alternative which I subscribe to is Hackerboxes[0]. It's a bit cheaper at $44/month and each month's box comes with all of the required hardware. You can check out the instructions for past boxes here[1].

I've followed both thimble.io and Hackerboxes prior to launch and thimble.io definitely has more thorough instructions and a nice learning platform[2] which may be less intimidating for beginners.

I ended up going with Hackerboxes because the kits include all the parts, use of open source hardware, the lower price, and they've already shipped a year's worth of kits.

[0] http://www.hackerboxes.com/

[1] http://www.instructables.com/member/HackerBoxes/instructable...

[2] https://learning.thimble.io/

Is there a subscription box that sends you just the parts for a project that uses an Arduino? Basically, I want to save cost by not having to get the (usually) most expensive part of the kit. I don't mind dismantling each month's project to reuse the core components.

From I can tell this is the model thimble.io follows though it is more expensive. I'm not aware of any other subscription box which offers this.

From what I can see, Hackerboxes use an ESP8266 01 or an Arduino Nano, both of which cost around $2. You will definitely not be paying lots for the MCU, and it's good to have lots of them (I have around 20 of various types at any time) because they're dirt cheap and you can use them anywhere.

The Hackerboxes site's main picture is of some surface mount blank boards, and I thought "Those guys are hardcore - they expect you to solder surface mount." But no. None of their kits require SMT assembly. The pictures are just clip art.

I find SMT assembly somewhat easier than through hole especially with a good temperature controlled iron. My experience level is just fixing up PCBs or adding a few parts while developing firmware at work.

I find there is a curve in learning how to solder SMT.

At first it's really difficult because of fear from the small size, sometimes the price of components, and the lack of proper equipment.

At some point you learn how your hands work, what techniques work, and how things flow; suddenly then things become easy and through-hole seems like a boring chore.

My enlightenment came with a good Hakko iron and the satisfaction of having a SMT capacitor 'snap' into place under a good solder flow. After that point of finally having a confirmation of what should happen, a weight fell off my shoulders -- mostly generated by anxiety from over-reading about what SHOULD be done rather than experimenting and just trying to get it done.

Now I jump at (most) smt projects.

(edit: not a bell curve, just a slip of the tongue)

Leaded solder, or lead-free? What I've been reading is that at the hobbyist level, most people are still using leaded solder. The tight temperature tolerances of lead-free are hard. I've tried hand-soldering with lead-free solder, but keep getting cold solder joints.

Stanford EE just set up a maker space, called Lab 64. I'm going to find out what tools they use, and how they teach soldering. Stanford EE labs have big "No Pb" signs; they insist on lead-free soldering.

I only use lead free these days - I also teach kids SMT first, I think it's easier to learn - thru hole requires better solder temp management than SMT and essentially 3 hands.

We start by giving the kids hot air and tweezers to harvest some parts from an old board, then have them install them on a scrap proto board no one needs any more

The price is a bit steep. I could probably justify it if I saw more project examples with a parts list. I can get an arduino uno knockoff from Amazon for about $5, so I'd want to know what is included to justify the price. Of course a major part of the price is coming up with kit, sourcing all the parts, etc.

Arduino kits have never been a good value proposition from a parts list perspective, you tend to hope it's the ease of access and guided learning that make it worthwhile.

Starter kits with pennies worth of a few passive components and a few "interesting" sensors on breakouts sell for 50$+. Taken at their parts list you could get a thousand assorted pieces of most of the passive components for a few bucks on eBay, and you could get the breakouts on AliExpress for a few bucks too.

But the time it'd take to wait for a packet from China, or even from the US for a small premium, can disrupt someone who's just learning. If you forget a part, that can be a week of waiting. The kit promises everything you'll need.

And the guided nature helps beginners not get caught up in the minutiae of designing things. Google "turn on LED with Arduino" and you'll get answers ranging from "just stick it in series with an IO pin(not a great idea imo)", to "use a NPN transistor (which leads down its own train of learning as to how it works and why it's needed)" and a bunch of stuff in between".

I know some basic electronics (I think), and felt I was better off "splurging" on AliExpress and eBay once and filling a drawer with an assortment of passive components and breakouts to sensors I thought might be interesting and just building stuff as it came to mind.

A handful of ESP8266s and some assorted sensors can make for some pretty interesting projects by themselves

FWIW, Atmel AVR (the Arduino microcontroller) I/Os are typically beefy enough to drive the 20 mA that LEDs usually like to get nice and bright. It was one of their early differentiators.

Depending on the LED, I would have no problem driving it directly with just a current limiting resisitor.

FAQ question 1 SHOLD ANSWER THIS, if you are asking someone to pay, at least tell them how much.

This is exactly what I need. I got an undergraduate education in CS and biochem, and now that I'm employed it felt impossible to devote time or energy to studying electronics. The subject is simply too deep. I was worried the only way I'd ever be able to learn would be to go back to university. This looks like a solution to my problem!

The only thing I worry about is a lack of mathematical rigor, but I suppose as long as I can get hands on experience that amounts to much more than I'd accomplish on my own.

In any event, this is beyond awesome and I'm subscribing as soon as I get home.

Check out Contextual Electronics, too, by Chris Gammel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEbu3h5FBZI

https://contextualelectronics.com/

I've heard good things about it. He tries to create a middle ground between the opposite ends of heavy theory with nothing to build and tinkering without conceptual understanding.

Analytical solutions in circuit analysis are impossible for the vast majority of nontrivial circuit designs and few subfields of electrical engineering require computer simulations so you wont see much mathematical rigor in practice. Electrical engineering is all about rules of thumb, experience, and intuition unless you're designing something like a high efficiency power circuit, a complex high speed digital or mixed mode design, or an antenna. Most of the time, my circuit designs are based off of reference designs provided by the part manufacturer, who also provide routing and design guidelines. As long as I'm not pushing the limits with fabrication (bigger board, more layers to route, few overlapping power domains, large vias and no microvias, etc) the first prototype usually just works, with a few minor mistakes and oversights, without having to do any math or simulations.

By the time intuition and documentation fails an experienced electrical engineer, they're probably designing something that costs tens of thousands of dollars to prototype and hundreds of thousands worth of testing equipment. It'll be a long while before you get to that point so I wouldn't worry about the math, although I still recommend studying it because it might help develop that intuition.

I recommend you get the Thomas C. Hayes "Learning the Art of electronics - a hands-on lab course" book and doing the work. Source components of ebay from China, stuff is dirt cheap. Get a $400 Rigdol scope and your set.

All I have is a breadboard, some wire, a variety of passive components and ICs from HK ($20 total for tens of thousands of parts), a USB oscilloscope (eBay $60-$200), and maybe an AVR or STM32 development board. I'm overwhelmed by the number of analog and digital projects I can do, and I've been messing around with my kit for a couple years. I mostly do hobby filter design and audio synthesis.

Do you have a link to the "passsive components"? What sort of thigns were you able to get in that pack?

I won't link any, but it's probably cheaper to buy variety packs of individual types of components. Search on eBay for "resistor assortment", "transistor assortment", "electrolytic capacitor assortment", "diode assortment", "LED assortment", "ceramic capacitor assortment", etc. Each of these packs of a few thousand mixed components are $0.50 to $4 shipped worldwide from China. Then pick up the most common ICs like the ne555p, lm741, lm393, pc817, etc. The game here is quantity over quality, so you never need a part that you don't have. Once you prototype your idea, then use Mouser to pick out your parts made with better quality control, although they're 10x more expensive. But this isn't a problem, as you should know exactly what you need after a prototype.

This is a great plan. I'm always astounded at the cost of individual components when you are looking for something specific, and the general lack of availability of things at places like Fry's or Radio Shack which were always well stocked with cheap options when I was young.

I like this :)

I'm a EE and I do this. Source variety packs from Mr. One Hung Low on ebay and bob's your uncle.

Example: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/0603-SMD-SMT-Chip-Capacitor-Assor...

No pictures is just silly.

I'm not at all technical by nature. I learned from the ARDX kit (but I still don't know much). It's what I recommend to other women. Work on it like a jigsaw puzzle in front of the TV at night for as many nights as it takes to finish.

One project per kit is a problem because you can't just move on to the next project. You get stuck and frustrated. I find dealing with that frustration is a big part of technical learning for beginners that lack confidence. with a kit that gives you a lot of projects you don't go to bed feeling dumb like you can't do this. This matters. At least to me.

50 bucks is pretty steep for a student like me. If something in the $20 range (that included no arduinos, just really shitty and cheap stuff off the "Shenzhen market" as Dave would say). No brand name stuff and I'd be fine with crappier instructions.

The cutoff for college student involvement is pretty much $20 and that's where the bread and butter market for something like this is. EE/CE/CS student's who want to be able to "do" electronics. Intersplice it will lesses on simple formulas we need in class and you've got a winner, you could even recylce kits every semester.

The 50 bucks only gets you your first Uno for free, recurring you don't get additional Unos. (I'm a customer, not someone from Thimble)

Presumably you have access to EE labs and don't need a kit at all? You're probably paying a lot more than $50 for access to EE labs.

Sadly no. You need to take an EE course AND buy an EE kit. Also don't get me started on the machine shop.

I'm willing to bet they have some old dev kits not being used by classes anymore that you could check out. Sure, they won't be Arduino, but you're not going to learn anything making Arduino sketches anyway. Look for a Freescale 6812 or TI DSP kit.

That's so retro. Take a look at the ads in this 1957 issue of Popular Electronics.[1] "You can train at home for good pay jobs Radio-Television - Get Practical Experience with Kits N.R.I. sends." (p.99) "You build AC-DC Superhet Receiver". "You build Vacuum Tube Voltmeter". A competing school offers a course that gets all the way up to building a TV kit. (p.7) And there's the DeVry Technical Institute, trying to sign up veterans back then and still at it today.

Distance learning goes back a long way.

[1] http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/50s/5...

I wanted to find at least one photo of the kit. The video is similar, but I prefer at least 2 or 3 photos.

About the video: (I didn't watch it f100%) Do all projects require soldering? Can I filter for non soldering projects? (Actually, I can solder but not extremely good. I even tried a few home made projects with my daughter so she can learn to solder, but she has already done many non soldering projects.)

It won't take too much to feel confident soldering. Watch a few videos, do some intentional practice, and you'll be good in no time. I just kept building projects and I'm fine now.

I can solder. It's just that I have to redo 1/3 of them and most of the times the solder joint is too cold. (I have a Chemistry specialization in secondary school. We learned a bit about electric circuits including soldering, but it's not my specialization.)

Anyway, I suspect that non-soldering projects may have a bigger audience.

Some advice I'd have appreciated early on, because it took me a long while to figure out on my own:

Use a tiny dab of solder on the iron tip for better heat transfer, and heat the joint for longer than it feels like you should need to. Melt the solder wire against the joint, not the iron - the iron will always melt solder, but that's not what it's there for; it's there to heat the joint until that melts the solder, which is what needs to happen for proper wetting and bonding to occur.

Also, resist the temptation to use too much solder; you don't want a blob, but rather a clean, concave flow from wire to pad. That's how you avoid cold joints.

> heat the joint for longer than it feels like you should need to.

You shouldn’t heat the joint for more than about 2 seconds before feeding solder into it. If you need longer than that, you probably don’t have a properly tinned tip or a properly cleaned joint, or your tip is too small, or perhaps your iron has low heat capacity.

I also highly recommend using lead-based flux-core solder, e.g. 63/37 Kester 44. The lead-free stuff is awful to work with.

Anyone trying to learn to solder should watch these videos, especially #1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL926EC0F1F93C1837

I run my iron cool to avoid overheating joints, a nasty habit left over from years of not knowing what I was doing. It takes six or eight seconds to heat a joint. Running at a higher temperature would probably obviate the need for the extra dab of solder on the tip, too; I add a tiny drop and roll it against the joint, but with a higher setting, I probably wouldn't need to.

The important thing is not the tip temperature per se, but the heat flow. Try watching that linked video, it’s great!

There's probably not a huge risk running it cooler, but I would definitely try to learn the correct way to save time. I have always tried to explain it like this: the idea is that the iron gets both areas to above the melting point of the solder, so that when solder is applied it cleanly wicks into both the pin and the pad.

Try and place the iron so that it heats both the pin and the pad at the same time. It helps to have a tiny bit of solder on the tip. Then, after around 1 second (unless the pad is on a ground plane, then maybe much longer...), feed in a bit of solder. It should melt and flow immediately on application. You don't need a lot to get a good connection, it should make a little 'hill' on the PCB. Remove the solder, then remove the iron. The joint should cool and leave a nice shiny connection (depends on the solder.)

Tip for using lead-free solder: when you are done soldering, always leave a big blob of solder on the tip before turning the iron off. This way, the tip doesn't oxidize in air while cooling, and you don't have to clean the tip all the time. Next time you solder, just one wipe of the tip after it heats up and it will be shiny and ready to go.

the most important thing you need to know about thu hole soldering is that you have to get the wire and the PCB pad both hot enough that solder will melt on both them - dont melt the solder onto the iron and depend on it flowing onto the rest - melt it onto the things you want to solder - feed it into the component lead and pad opposite from the iron.

Do that and you'll never get a cold joint

The FAQ says that soldering is required on all projects. Online instruction is given etc.

HeathKit partically-reinvented themselves: https://shop.heathkit.com/shop

I remember changing the channel on a color HeathKit TV at my grandparents by shaking house keys because the ultrasonic remote sensor circuit interpreted it as channel down. (It had a diagnostic and circuit diagram on a fold-down panel IIRC.)

Also my father and grandfather both made multiple technology generations of oscilloscopes from kits. And, my father opened an electrical automotive shop in Santa Clara, thanks in part to learning from HeathKit and other study-at-home electronics courses.

I did this in the 1960s with American Basic Science Club. The projects were incremental- the amplifier tube one month became the core of the radio receiver next month and hamradio telegraph another month. I got almost everything to work. It was five dollars a month then, maybe 75 dollar in current money. http://www.quickreference.info/small-business-stories/americ... I see similar kits are making a comeback.

This is great! Are there similar subscription services in the UK/Europe?

I have no idea about the quality, but I saw this kit getting posted on Twitter this afternoon: http://www.boldport.club/. It looks a little simpler, but may scratch the itch you're looking for.

Nice looking site and packaging. I am teaching myself analog electronics design, and something to help me achieve that objective quicker would be nice. I am doing it as a hobby and don't want to spend a lot either!

I think the price of $50 or $60 for a random kit is a too expensive[1]. A better model for the product, in my opinion is a magazine + bag of parts and materials $20-$30 monthly or bi-monthly seems fair. The parts and materials could be used to build circuits and conduct experiments that help you better understand the theory.

[1]As a reference point, for probably $20, you could get yourself a TI launchpad (or similar) and a bunch of parts that would allow you to build a TON of fun and interesting circuits.

So I subscribed, but the site says the next kit ships in November 2016. When do new subscribers expect to see their kits?

The site says January 2016 for me.

Here's what I see: http://m.imgur.com/NklUwqe

It's also the same on my desktop.

One of the devs here... looks like that was caused by an A/B testing template from the people dealing with marketing. It's been fixed.

edit: Just to be clear, the next kit does ship in January 2017.

A/B testing doesn't mean 30% get this bug, 30% this one, yada yada.

J/K your kit seems awesome and I think I'll subscribe myself. Want to up my electronics game so something like that might keep me on pace.

This is kind of like NerdKits, only NerdKits is a one-time purchase with dozens of different projects you can make.

http://www.nerdkits.com

Love this idea. Please post some photos of the kits and example projects.

I am trying to decide between Adabox from Adafruit and Thimble. Does anyone has experience with these two subscriptions?

I received the adabox second box just before Christmas. Its a ton of stuff, I feel I got far more than my $60 worth although of course its stuff they selected not stuff I selected. I did not sign up in time to get the first box, so I can't comment on the first box. I think the first box was something with RGB LEDs, looks interesting.

The second box is "make a robot" with a feather which is an adafruit thing which is a custom arduino with on board bluetooth. It looks extremely easy to me, but I am not a noob to either electronics or mechanics. Its a nice little set, everything you need to mess around with a little robot.

Its "make a robot" in the post 1990s sense of a robot is a homemade RC car with homemade UI. Not make a robot in the pre 1990s sense of its possibly a stationary arm, or its autonomous, or it does something other than be a possibly weaponized RC car. So its a rather basic homemade RC car, OK cool.

Needless to say with the holiday obligations I've done nothing with it other than watch the videos and paw it all over and there's no way I'm going to get to mess with it due to obligations etc until well after the new year.

Everything seems very well selected and packed and looks fun. It looks quite expandable. Somewhere on my cluttered workbench I have a nice IMU/magnetometer/accelerometer I2C board and I think it would be fun to bolt on. It is not maxed out and cries out to be messed with and expanded. Its open loop motors, so I'd like to use a simple IMU board to close the loop so a 90 degree turn really is 90 degrees and so on. Also I could use the magnetometer to discipline the straight line such that its really straight not a curve with a large unknown radius. That'll probably be my first experiment on my own after I complete the official published experiments.

My decades of experience with boxes implies that if a company mostly sells "stuff" and occasionally offers a box or gift basket it'll be a great deal with overstocked items marked down as much as 50%, maybe more, but if its a "gift box company" the prices of the components (perhaps a cheese log or a summer sausage) will be marked UP at least 100% to 500%. So because adafruit is mostly a "stuff seller" and not a "box seller" the box price to retail component price ratio is awesome. There must be $120+ of retail price stuff in the $60 adabox. The thimble being a company focused on selling boxes, I would assume the price ratio will be more like the "sausage and cheese holiday gift box" biz where the box is at least 200% of retail component price. I would be happy to be surprised if thimble is in fact a good value, but observations of parallel businesses implies that would be quite an achievement if they pull it off.

This kind of thread is exactly the reason I read HN every day. You folks all rock. You just cost me a lot of money, but it's for all kind of fun stuff I can probably use at work as an entertainment electrician.

Thanks for the Hacker Box rec too, just subscribed. My crew at work is already excited.

Probably better to subscribe to something like Everyday Practical Electronics (UK) or Elektor (Netherlands) if you want some random projects. Then you get a chance to reject the ones you aren't interested in.

Anyway USD59 a month is ridiculous, you can by a big Arduino kit for less than the price of one month, for instance this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Ultimate-UNO-R3-Starter-Kit-For-...

After that you can just buy bits and pieces as needed.

There is no shortage of free help to be found online, all you need do is ask.

Cool! I was just talking about something very similar - some kind of parent + kid project kit box, for busy parents who want to work with their kids on something but don't have the knack / time to figure it all out for themselves.

I was looking for similar as well. Have an 8 month old and plopped him down to watch the intro video and he looked pretty interested. Looks like a bunch of different learning all at once, why not try to teach algebra at an early age, or whatever the thimble website is getting at with how early a kid can start learning to code? I am running a small business and don't have the time I use to have, mucking around for parts trying to nickel and dime everything. Civil Engr over here who wants his kid to engage in this kind of stuff instead of handing a tablet over for him to watch youtube cartoons.

This is interesting but I'm not particularly impressed with the seemingly-outdated website. Says the next kit will ship Nov 2016? Not going to sign up for a recurring subscription for something that may never come.

Was just thinking today of how to get started with hardware as a software engineer. Signing up now. Quick conversion suggestions - show real people on the landing page, show pictures of the real product.

This is mildly off-topic. I just got a robot, motor shield and and Arduino for my 8 year old niece. In about 10 mins, we put the robot chassis together. The software was a different story. She had used code.org with its scratch-like blockly-based programming language. This made her think processing was too complicated and generally unappealing. Anyone else have ideas on how to deal with this?

I am having trouble find an example of the kit that I would be receiving. Can anyone link me to an example, I am very interested in this .

I'm a customer, not a Thimble employee - but here are the instructions for the 1st kit:

https://learning.thimble.io/modules/wi-fi-bot-part-1

Should give you an idea of what's included.

Wow, that's really expensive.

I've subscribed to HackerBoxes since their start; significantly cheaper (sometimes thrown together and a little cheap, but never boring).

So boom! there are at least three of these, thimble.io, hackerboxes, and Adabox. They are all basically the same idea, every month a new "kit" of parts etc comes in. You open the box, you use the parts to build something, and then in another month something else shows up.

The weak spot in all three seems to be the curriculum.

So in general I love that this takes the 'get the stuff' problem out of the way. Sure you can buy a book on transistor projects or computer projects, but then you have to source the parts and move from there. The same issue happens with the "starter kits".

Back in the 80's and 90's a number of people made "<some#>-in-1" electronic boxes. These usually had the components mounted on a substrate and usually came in two flavors, in the first flavor everything was mounted on the substrate and you just stuck wire between springs to make your circuits[1]. Then they added a breadboard and you could wire up the basic circuit on the breadboard with the knobs and such around it[2]. And then even some compute stuff built in[3].

So what generally makes these things engaging are either they are easy to start and get more interesting as you build on your knowledge, or they culminate into something useful. There was an RCA technician training course where you built all of the components of a color television and then assembled them into the final unit[4]. You got a color TV out of it and a lucrative career in television repair :-).

I'm not trying to be dismissive of this idea, I'm trying to say that these ideas work best when they have an editorial position, a path, start points and end points. Imagine a web design "box" type product where each month you got a box with some aspect of web site design. It would include exercises and text book type material, quizzes and working problems so that at the end of each month you had mastered some part of the web service stack. So perhaps your first month would be about putting up a web server, the second month about getting keys so that it can be secured with SSL, then the third month CSS that helps style the pages, and the fourth month maybe PHP or a JS module. Each month with a digestable bit that assumes you're going to spend perhaps one or two evenings a week on the material. At the end of the year you have a full web app deployed on a droplet or something. But every month you get something that works and something that builds on the overall thing.

Electronics can do that if you pick a specific area of interest, so sensors or computers or radio or audio.

An editorial spin like that could take the box idea and take it to a whole new level I think.

[1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/9141qwL5XvL...

[2] http://www.elenco.com/product/productdetails/project_labs=NT...

[3] http://www.elenco.com/product/productdetails/project_labs=NT...

[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=wi0DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA39&lpg=P...

Looks promising but it would be useful . One of the problems with hardware hacking in the US is the demise of local shops like Radio Shack that sold components. It can be very intimidating to order a few parts from the big sellers like Mouser and Arrow. There are a few places that sell kits but a subscription could be a nice present for a kid. Consider advertising in senior oriented magazines since grandparents might be the main buyers for this.

I've been thinking about trying to build a radio from scratch lately. Any chance a kit like that's in there?

I recall WWII PoW stories of 'foxhole' radios[1] made from rusting razors and paper clips, I always thought replicating that would be quite fun.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio

Yea man, crystal radios are great. Many books, vids and material on the subject. Think I built my fist set in primary school, winding and mounting the coils are delightfully steampunk-esqueish, building a sweet box for the thing from aromatic hardwood is a trip in itself.

Hell yes, make you some crystal radio magic, highly recommended.

There's a book that you might find interesting: "Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist's Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits" [1].

I've not read it, but I've heard good things about it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Transistor-Radios-High-Per...

I would be really interested in something like this with surface mount kits.

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