Electronics Course (45 episodes, YouTube)
youtube.com
youtube.com
https://www.youtube.com/@adultliteracyandenglishlang
Here is the reading/writing playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9RaD1SLwSoZhMNz7pqRw...
I like her pacing (not fast, not too slow) and the way she presents herself. It seems like a high quality course, even if the audio and video quality are not perfect. I wonder how we could bring more awareness to this great work and others like it.
It shouldn't be this hard to find something this specific on a video host with the worlds most powerful search engine bedded into it. It's gotten to the point where I archive and store links for anything I might want to find later, but I found this before I was of that mindset and I've wanted to share it with people. When search rot is worse than link rot there's a big problem.
It's unbelievable how shallow and narrow and bad google/youtube search has become. It didn't happen over night. Year by year, little by litte, it got worse and worse.
If anyone knows of something similar for mechanical engineering I would be very interested. (Thanks in advance from a physicist who should probably have been an engineer instead :-) )
While I don't think that a degree would've added much to my professional life as I learned what I wanted/needed I can't but say that chemistry gave me even less (aside of being generally good at theoretical and practical sciences).
How deep do you want to go in terms of where to draw the line between building and buying parts?
Avoid lithium ion batteries. Use a deep discharge lead acid battery instead.
But do I need to spend 45 hours watching this to empower me to successfully design, say, a microcomputer board? A Z80? 6502? Even an 8088? Do I need this level of depth to get a microcontroller to make a stepper motor do what I want to do (whatever that may be)? Or a power circuit to drive a higher power motor controller? (Do I need relays for that? Power transistors? Big capacitors?)
Because that's what I think many who are interested in "electronics" want to do. Will the lack of understanding of a PN junction cause those kinds of projects to fail? Or be more difficult to do?
For someone interested in these kinds of projects, is there a better place to put 45 hours of study? Perhaps just wiring stuff together, stamping out fires, and tracing down the smoky parts?
I've followed few MIT courses (mostly on algebra, category theory and some more CS-related) and while a video took me 1 hour, the actual amount of time around it (writing down the important things, summarizing, exercising, finding answers about the topics touched) was much more.
Between twice and 4 times the amount.
On that front in-person education has definitely two benefits: you have peers in your same situation with whom you can discuss the topics and obviously access to teachers and their assistants.
Dave over at the EEVBlog likes to draw a distinction here. He distinguishes between people who want to learn electronics (build power supplies, radios), that is, analog circuits, from people who want put together Arduino projects. He refers to the latter as more of embedded programming rather than electronics.
The linked course definitely leans way over to the side of the former. If you’re more interested in the latter, there are tons of YouTube channels out there about building projects with the Arduino.
I have learned a ton from him over the years, but when you watch something like his video about Flux, it's hard not to feel a little gross. This is subjective, but when you spend a lot of time making sweeping generalizations and then quite literally read the fawning comments as though an echo chamber proves your point... that's when I have to check out.
https://youtu.be/x5Yslag6Mxk?si=FjL8lHjFhWtFsWun&t=45
My bias is that I've been using Flux for about a year and while it's not without flaws... it's actually pretty great.
TL;DR: dividing people who are building things with electronics into "real" vs "embedded" is just a way to enforce a very artificial hierarchy where you're conveniently always at the top.
There is an artificial hierarchy here but it’s not the one you’re thinking of. It’s a hierarchy of abstractions. At the lowest level of abstraction you’re dealing with physics, Maxwell’s equations, materials and their properties. Above that you have the lumped matter abstraction (conductors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, transistors). Above that you have modular circuit components, ICs, digital logic. Above that you have CPUs, instruction sets, assembly language… This abstraction continues all the way up through software engineering.
The reason Dave makes this distinction is not because he wants to gatekeep. It’s because he wants people to learn how to build their own circuits rather than combining modules built by others. This is no different from a programmer telling someone to learn a programming language to build their own software rather than using Microsoft Office etc.
Dave does plenty of embedded programming himself. He uses Arduinos when the project calls for them. He just wants people to understand that there’s a whole lot more to understand when you go to a lower level of abstraction (lumped matter components).
I think it’s also an important distinction to be made because a lot of businesses have sprung up within the Arduino ecosystem and it’s brought a lot of new people into the electronics world. These folks are excited and enthusiastic but they often lack knowledge of electronics fundamentals and so they struggle to troubleshoot when things go wrong. It’s important to help these people find the resources they need to learn electronics so they don’t need to rely on others to troubleshoot their circuits.
I see a parallel between the Arduino/Adafruit folks and the people who go through developer bootcamps. It is extremely ill advised to make sweeping statements about bootcamp grads which might imply a shallow depth of understanding or troubleshooting capacity, because so many people will get very upset about your gatekeeping. That vibe hasn't made its way to the EE world, clearly.
I've had a 35 year and counting career as a self-taught software developer. I've learned a lot about adjacent concepts without needing to become particularly expert in any of them, because I learned early to delegate to others' strengths. For example, I've never learned assembly or been unable to function because I couldn't implement a device driver. I also have very weak math skills in general.
All of which brings me to the actually important question: what knowledge or skills do you need to do what you have set out to do? An honest evaluation of most problems can only result in "not that much, actually" because you are not working in a vacuum. We have YouTube and GPT. We make friends with complimentary skills, and we develop a sense of when to persist vs when to ask for help.
I don't subscribe to the idea that someone who has internalized all of the formulas is somehow more pure, any more than I assign respect to someone who still memorizes all of their friends' phone numbers.
In many/most cases, not knowing which topics we should obtain deep knowledge of is actually a negative. While it's perfectly reasonable to decide that you want to know all about Maxwell's equations, but you should see it for what it is: a hobby, unless you have a damn good reason to prioritize it over something silly like shipping your project.
It's like the DIY keyboard community, I guess: it's cool that folks want to get that nerdy about building their own data input device... but if you stop to build your idea of the perfect keyboard before starting the task assigned to you, you deserve to be given a strike.
TL;DR: 98% of people with a deliverable in mind would be better suited by a Collin's Lab video than a 45 minute lecture on the physics that make capacitors work.
At another level of abstraction, say Python programming, you're much less likely to have to deal with this issue because memory is managed for you. You can get a lot done with Python without ever needing to know anything about the lower levels. Python is a much more solid abstraction than C++, which is leaky.
Electronics is even worse than C++. All of the rules and formulas with lumped matter abstractions change when you move into the realm of high frequency signals. A circuit you build to operate at low frequency may fail utterly at high frequency due to transmission line effects. The Arduino/Adafruit communities try to get around these issues by largely operating at low speeds and confining much of the high speed stuff (radios) to built-in modem circuits and antennas.
But even at low speeds, you still have issues with things like impedance, current, etc. Beginners hoping to run an electric motor on the IO pins of their Arduino are going to be confused and frustrated when it doesn't work. Not only that, but experimentation in electronics can result in electric shocks and even fires if users don't know what they're doing. This is one area where software has a big advantage: it's pretty hard to do physical damage to your property (or your health) with a Python script.
One of the most shocking things (no pun initially intended) about learning electronics [as someone who has spent absurd amounts of time tweaking the user experience of interacting with text input elements] is the cold realization that you have to manually handle switch bounce. Because physics.
Wait, I have to think about how tiny bits of widget bounce when they come into contact with each other? Every button and every encoder? You'be got to be kidding me.
And so you set out on the dark road as you first wonder WTF is going on with your counter, then you start tracking the time between pulses. Then you learn about hardware interrupts and state machines and oscilloscopes. Then you learn about RC and Schottky diodes and soon, hex inverters.
Would I benefit from a two hour lecture about the math behind RC calculations? It might be interesting, but at some point if you pull enough yarn out of the sweater, it stops keeping you warm.
I have always really enjoyed clever and/or obsessive answers to "describe what happens when you type a URL into your browser". If someone starts with the mechanical behaviour of a cherry switch before talking about the USB protocol, is this not the free jazz of computer science?
Is it not our "The Aristocrats"?
Analog is in some ways more complicated. But there are lots of reference designs for blocks like filters and amplifiers and you can look at the pros/cons of different circuits. A good companion to this sort of design work is Horowitz and Hill. Even high frequency board design can mostly be achieved around by following best practices unless you're doing stripline RF stuff.
The difference lies in things like designing extremely efficient circuits (optimize for part number, cost, etc) and designing boards that can be certified. You can get away with a lot if you're not designing to a tight spec.
In my university there were two main course around electronics (past the electromagnetism part pf the physics course) circuit theory (all things voltages, currents, various laws like thevenin, transformations, capacitors, resistors, inductances and ideal diodes) and then there was the electronic course (all things transistor, basic signal analysis etc). My university was a proper (and major) engineering-centered university though.
[1] https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/microelectronic-circuits...
When I did a Sedra/Smith course, it was after two semesters of passive linear circuit analysis, so it makes sense to skip the basics in lecture 1.
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Personally, I found 6.002 (MIT's Circuits lecture[2]) very good for getting through electricity basics and into amplifier modelling, and then using Falstad's simulator to explore real amplifiers and diode circuits. I wish the lecture audio was better, because at one point he moves from the I-V bend of a crude amplifier into the linear region (by applying a bias voltage and shrinking the signal input) while playing music[3], and that sounds really cool live.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F74AFA03AA06A11
[3] https://youtu.be/JqvKtMNz3RQ?t=1480
It's old content, so 240p. At one point, they had better lecture videos from a more recent year, but those are maybe on edX or MIT DSpace or their Digital Learning server.
Here's the same course, but on invidious, for those who don't go onto Youtube "proper".
Is there a HN policy on this? Seems more "neutral" to post the non-youtube link to me. There are people who don't go on to youtube, whereas I don't know of anyone with a moral issue with invidious?
Anyway, course looks cool, I'm bookmarking for after doing a few more practical fun things first to build motivation. Cheers.