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Comment by hbrav | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of thing that is solid gold for a well-motivated hobbyist. Lots of content together in one place that takes a (I hope) coherent journey through the "what's important" of a subject.

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 :-) )

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A well-motivated hobbyist with a physics degree maybe. As someone who studied EE, I wouldn’t recommend most hobbyists sit through all this unless they have a solid background in basic engineering math. He assumes some knowledge of the Laplace transformation for instance. Really, you don’t need to know this stuff to do hobby electronics. You can get pretty far in thinking about circuits at a higher level. Of course, if you want to build your own amplifiers and know exactly what’s going on everywhere you will need sit down and learn and get a more in-depth foundational understanding.

What do you recommended for non-EE major hobbyist?

I think answering that depends on ones goals and current level of understanding. Some others in the other thread did a good job pointing in the right direction. Whatever gets you away from just watching Youtube and actually building basic circuits. Adafruit has some good starting points, or used to. If you can hook up an op-amp IC and get it to amplify a signal and why that works intuitively you will have gotten pretty far. Really, the intuition comes from understanding what frequencies capacitors and inductors help and hinder, and what happens to components in parallel and in series. Build a radio kits used to be pretty awesome for this.

I'm a chemist who should've went for Informatica (computer science) or Ingegneria Informatica (computer engineering) too, I can relate.

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).

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