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Comment by timfsu | Hacker News Reader

As someone with an EE undergrad and masters degree, you really don't need it to hack on electronics, especially if you'll be starting with off-the-shelf parts or a microcontroller kit. Understanding the basics of voltage, current, and the ability to use a multimeter and soldering iron are probably all you need to make some interesting things.

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Echoing this point, an electronics project book, a breadboard and some simple components are all you need to get really really far in combining electronics like this. You can get 90% of the way there with just Ohm's Law. For laying out circuits you can learn about capacitance and inductance, but again, you can literally learn by doing. As in all technical endeavors, debugging is the real skill.

The rest you learn along the way.

As for the eInk laptop, I have that eDream as well. The hack I wanted was to use an LCD panel across the top for live editing, undo, etc. And then once the line was done, the eink display would wake-up, take the new line of text and write it to the display and then go back to sleep.

A couple nice eink options for the discriminating hacker

https://www.crowdsupply.com/soldered/inkplate-10

https://www.waveshare.com/

Remarkable just came out with a keyboard for their eink device, so that might do the trick for you for now. Its battery life isn't anywhere near what you're asking, unfortunately.

https://remarkable.com/

> an electronics project book, a breadboard and some simple components are all you need to get really really far in combining electronics like this.

Well, don't leave us hanging, do recommend a book to start with

I started with the Forrest Mims [1] Engineer's Mini-Notebooks from Radio Shack. They contain very little prose and lots of circuits you can build on a breadboard.

https://hackaday.com/2017/01/18/forrest-mims-radio-shack-and...

My recommendation for a current book, that is affordable is

"Practical Electronics for Inventors" by Paul Scherz

As someone with an EE degree I would agree with this. I was disappointed to find out that my career was mostly cutting and pasting stuff out of datasheets and using crib spreadsheets written by some revered dead guy who didn't haven any EE degree anyway and worked it out by reading some books.

Yep. Just started doing circuit design as a hobby to supplement a software project of mine and yeah, pretty much this. It's a lot of fun and isn't super complex to get something working.

I think learning what common design practices like bypass caps, knowing when to apply certain formulas and when not (ohm's law / linear/non-linear components), and knowing where to find help when needed, especially for circuit review, was crucial.

Download kicad and watch a few videos and most software devs I know would figure out enough in a short amount of time.

Bonus points if you understand constraint systems because that's pretty much the entirety of CAD.

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