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Comment by cuu508 | Hacker News Reader

You can learn all of this on your own! Like most of us learned programming ;-)

Probably don't start with a self-balancing cube as the first project though. Get an Arduino or ESP board, make some leds blink and go from there.

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Arduino + LED = Hello World for electronics.

Find a project online that tickles your fancy, and then recreate that. If your thing doesn't work, you know it is something you did incorrectly as the project has been built successfully by others. During the course of that project, you will pick up on so many little things.

As an example, I had a project with more buttons than pins. Just something as simple as adding a few resistors to each button allows multiple buttons to be connected to the same pin. You just have test the voltage to know which button. Sounds simple, but I learned it from someone else's build.

Nobody likes walking through tutorials for tutorials sake, but it's still useful and rewarding if you can build something functional as a tutorial.

> If your thing doesn't work

One of the things I find paralyzing about electronics is the fact energy is involved. Software just outputs garbage to the terminal if I screw it up. Circuits though? Isn't it possible for components to be literally destroyed, fires started?

um, what do you think is powering the CPU/GPU combo you are writing software for uses? I guess you missed the period of "releasing the magic smoke" of software. But if you are designing a project that uses enough power to start fires, you've chosen poorly for your starter projects. Most electronics are using 3.3v or 5v while sipping miliamps. Sure, you can smoke a chip that wants 3.3 from feeding it 5v, but if you're designing a project near flammable substances, you're doing it wrong.

Yes, you can start fires with uncontrolled currents. This is what fuses are for. Also what my sibling comment said; start small, blow up small things by making mistakes (like putting a transistor in the wrong way around and pushing several amps through its inherent body diode; we've all been there), and then you'll be confident enough to start playing with actual power electronics (if you want to).

What you'll find though is that, as a result of everyone before you making the same kinds of mistakes, there exists protection circuitry for almost everything you would want to do. For example, Lithium-Ion batteries are quite unsafe if you treat them without the respect they deserve, but that's what e.g. the DW01-P IC is for, and many Li-Ion charging ICs feature NTC thermistor inputs (e.g. the LTC4053) to stop charging if the cell is outside of some safe temperature range.

If you're really worried, a CO2 extinguisher and a bucket of sand go a long way.

As someone who has managed to accidentally and completely fry a Windows install with an unchecked C programme when I started to learn programming - there's still you can screw up using just code.

It would be really hard to start a fire with an Arduino with 5V USB power. You might fry some components, but even then, they usually just stop working (with a little magic smoke if you're lucky, but typically not) and you lose a dollar or two. Don't let a genuine fear of safety issues stop you from tinkering with low-voltage hobby electronics. Stay away from 120/240VAC mains power of course, but an Arduino and the 5VDC from a USB charger is a pretty forgiving environment.

You call it frying some components, I call it finding which of the little black cubes on the Arduino circuit board is the voltage regulator. It gave off such a pretty orange glow :-D

Just in case someone gets the wrong idea, doing "hello world" first is a good habit for everyone when starting to use a new device or a new lab setup, not just beginners.

It's to make sure that the environment is set up right. Is the device getting flashed? Does it start up at all? If you make a change (blink at a different rate), do you see your change?

Here's a handy guide ;)

https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/76048012124142796...

Hah. That hit home. But now I have a kid and we are slowly starting to delve into things. It is oddly fun to explore this realm together.

Hah! This is me. I bought an Arduino and a ton of components and I pretty much stalled out at blinking LED. I also watched all of Ben Eater's YouTube videos on building an 8-bit computer from simple ICs and then bought all the parts to do it and never put it together. I realized that I'd already learned how it worked from the videos, and putting it together would just be rote work that I already knew the outcome of. I tried to think of some practical reason to do it, or some modifications I might make, but then I moved and never unpacked the stuff.

What you're forgetting is it absolutely would not work when you first put it together. You would then begin a journey of debugging which would teach you a lot more than any YouTube video ever could.

The most powerful thing for me was making sure that I had the relays/etc necessary to safely control 120v circuits.

Then you can make something that can turn off or on "real things" and work from there.

If it can do 120v, it can usually to 12v, and that's the next step - directly controlling components.

Yep! A self-balancing cube can definitely be your sixth project, though.

Sometimes taking a big challenge can accelerate learning. As long as you're not giving up ;)

Completely true and good advice

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