Ask HN: What is the best way to get into building electronics as a programmer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best way to get into building electronics as a programmer?

9 pointsnewsoul12 comments

I am asking not only about learning what is taught in classes for solving ideal problems. I am talking about the real engineering like a hobbyist who actually understands what works in real life and how to build it properly.

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I learned a lot from watching YouTube, here are some that IMHO have great content for this, in no particular order:

https://www.youtube.com/@RobertFeranec

https://www.youtube.com/@MicroTypeEngineering (includes some nice critiques of viewer-submitted designs)

https://www.youtube.com/@AltiumAcademy (including some great conference talks)

I've also really enjoyed these for more basic understanding of electronics:

https://www.youtube.com/@FesZElectronics

https://www.youtube.com/@w2aew

That said I'd say perhaps join a Discord. The MicroTypeEngineering channel has a fairly active Discord with a good mix of pros and hobbyists who help each other in design questions and such.

YouTube was a HUGE resource for me following my Associate's program in EE. All of the channels they list above, plus here's some of my other favorites:

- https://www.youtube.com/@reps (German laserist and metrology nerd)

- https://www.youtube.com/@BenEater (famous for his breadboard 8-bit PC series)

- https://www.youtube.com/@mitxela (quirky DIY/hacker)

- https://www.youtube.com/@IMSAIGuy (HP/Bell Labs veteran)

- https://www.youtube.com/@Lantertronics (Georgia Tech professor of EE, excellent lectures in well-organized playlists)

- https://www.youtube.com/@tomtektest8042 (former CTO, EE prof, possibly passed away, but his channel is a TREASURE to any aspiring engineer)

- https://www.youtube.com/@mikeselectricstuff (British lighting/display guru)

- https://www.youtube.com/@ElPasoTubeAmps (Former NASA/Navy engineer, tube amps, radio broadcasting)

- https://www.youtube.com/@joesmith-je3tq (winner of the quickest breadboard oscillator on the planet a few years back with ~7GHz I think)

- https://www.youtube.com/@tesla500 (inventor of the Chronos high-speed cam)

- https://www.youtube.com/@Photonvids (entertaining "don't try this at home" high voltage experiments)

- https://www.youtube.com/@Thesignalpath (super-high competence teardown/analysis of high-end test equipment)

- https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc (Bell Labs/PARC veteran, CTO of Samtec, restored an original Apollo 11 guidance computer to fully working condition--a national treasure)

- https://www.youtube.com/@NicholasRehm (EE grad student, inventor of dRehmFlight, an open-source flight controller for quad-copters)

- https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience (engineer at Google X, mad scientist)

That's my best recs for folks who focus on EE, and who put forth worthwhile content that is fun to watch and meaningfully educational. If anyone knows of some good EE Discord rooms, I'd love to know about them.

[EDIT: Formatting for readability]

I'd strongly recommend getting an Arduino starter kit, something with motors, sensors, etc. You need to get an intuitive feel for series and parallel circuits, what capacitors do, etc. Also pick up a multimeter, and if you can, some form of Oscilloscope, so you can see the signals.

As for the real world, most electrolytic capacitors from before 10 years ago are just junk. Tantalum capacitors tend to commit suicide by shorting then possibly exploding, sometimes taking out other things, or circuit traces.

If you understand all of the above, then you're ready to read "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill.[1] They get into the nitty-gritty about practical choices of components, etc.

[1] https://artofelectronics.net/

+1 for Horowitz's Art of Electronics. Get the original text, and the companion exercise book if possible. The original book is kind of pricey, but a worthwhile addition to any engineer's bookshelf as a lifelong reference.

I took 5 light semesters of EE at my local community college. I have probably learned more from YouTube, in the end, but I don’t think I could have been nearly as effective in my learning without the formal school curriculum. It gave me a rock solid foundation, and allowed, me to focus on the most relevant topics to get where I wanted to be (primarily working on audio hardware, with a bit of DIY tooling and misc tinkering).

Trust me when I tell you that it’s the easiest, most efficient way of discovering where your strengths are, and where you have gaps in your knowledge. Don’t worry about the academics side of the classes, just take the things you’re interested in, and call it done when you feel you have gotten what you need from it. Community college classes are generally very affordable in most states, if not free. Get your textbooks used.

Assuming you're interested in embedded software (pure electronics is it's own thing):

Unless you're already a competent C++ developer, I would start with getting either an ESP8266 or ESP32 and making some simple projects in Arduino IDE by stitching libraries together. You can do a lot with various sensors, actuators, and a bit of simple glue code. Getting outside that simplified Arduino world requires additional learning curves so have fun there first if you can.

I'm a full stack developer and I code in many languages but I haven't had to do any low level C++ code in a while and I'm finding that my biggest hurdle as I'm getting into a complicated embedded project where there aren't libraries for what I'm trying to do.

Of course there are frameworks for programming ESPs in Lua, Micro Python, and JavaScript (Espruino) but those have their own learning curves and limited available libraries too.

Doing the thing is the only way to get into doing things.

An old Radio Shack Science Fair N-in-One kit (for N between 25 and 300) is a way that might work because they are hands on and were designed for beginners.

Wanting a best way to do a thing is a way of avoiding the hard reality that you will be bad at the thing when you start. So a soldering iron and a willingness to suck is another reasonable way to start electronics…irrespective of whether a software engineer or seamstress.

Anyway, doing things badly is the only way to learn how to do them well. The only way to keepiuppi 100 times is to start struggling to keepiuppi twice and then thrice and all other 99 steps.

Good luck.

"Best" depends on who you are. I suggest just jumping in and starting. Find a real problem and build something to address it. Make yourself an audio amplifier or Arduino robot. Start fiddling with blinkylight GPIO on a raspberry pi. Build a one wheel skateboard.

you might find ideas here: https://hackaday.com/blog/

“Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt will give you a solid understanding of practical circuit building and why we design circuits the way we do. This is a really great book, very well written.

From a programming standpoint though, get an Arduino compatible board and starter kit and go to town. You can do lots of cool electronics projects with an Arduino and some LEDs.

Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz is pretty good, but hard for me to tell if it is good for a complete beginner as I come from a non-electrical/electronics engineering background and we still get taught the basics in first year and have the fundamentals.

For programmers, who know only one danger do not trunceate table on production database, I need to told for electronics beginner to make experiments with voltage below 36 Volts, please.

Practice, practice, practice.

Oh no... that's how you get to Broadway, sorry.

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