[ChrisGammell]

It's tough at the beginning, there are so many paths to go down, especially on the theoretical side of things.

My suggestion for beginners is to grab an Arduino and make a blinky project. Try to program some LEDs lighting up. This will help introduce you to the concept of current and resistance, and will have some direct feedback. Normally the biggest source of frustration is how long it takes to get from start to finish on a small project in electronics. I think Arduinos do well to shortcut this. Check out some of the adafruit tutorials and boards to start on the right foot.

After that if you're interested in PCBs, I do short courses on YouTube under my brand called Contextual Electronics. Search for things like "Shine on you crazy KiCad" and "Getting to blinky" on YouTube, or check out the link below. The former is the simplest version of a PCB plugged into a Raspberry Pi (controlled via Python), and the latter is using a 555 timer to do the same without any programming elements. These are both primarily LED focused again but only because it takes some time to get used to electronic components before moving on to more complicated things like inductors and op amps. If you end up being interested in that, I have entire courses on my site about how to use those in your designs, in increasing complexity. The most recent course shows how to design a board with bluetooth and cellular capabilities.

Good luck! Electronics to something I've been doing for 20 years and I still get excited about working on it every day.

https://contextualelectronics.com/courses/shine-on-you-crazy...

https://contextualelectronics.com/GTB

[Roybot]

Woah this looks seriously invaluable for a beginner. I studied CompE and ended up going the software route. I am now just coming back to electronics with the hopes of combining my software knowledge with hardware to build useful consumer electronics.

It's people like you, Dave Jones, bunnie, and folks at adafruit that make this stuff accessible and feel approachable . YouTube University is real. Thanks man.

[ancient_art]

For me it's more about creating something that I can touch and projects that have an end. Electronics and PCBs in particular just happen to be really interesting to me.

But other than that I can only agree with your comment.

[ancient_art]

Thank you for your links.

One project I want to definitely try is a weather rock like project. Like a LED that lights up when the sun hits a sensor and useless stuff like this.

There's actually a simple PCB from a tutorial I followed already on it's way to me. I hope it works out.