[hipaa_eng]

As a software engineer, seeing hardware projects like this makes me want to go back to school and pick up a few electrical engineering courses. The hardware space just seems to unlock so much (honestly blown away with the LCD retrofit at the end of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVscvWAR1s )

I've played with simple electronics on the arduino and raspberry pi platforms but this is a whole new level. Anyone gone down this path? Something you would recommend?

[Aromasin]

Honestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill. Spend some time working through that book. By the end of it, you'll have a better grasp of electronics than 90% of the engineers I've worked with, all who are EE bachelors/majors. It's a 3 month job at most, less if you do a dedicated hour a night. Then pick up some breadboard and parts, and build to your hearts content.

Making a working circuit is honestly very easy once you know the basics. Look inside a Made in China knockoff appliance, and you'll see that most things can be made from a couple of conponents and a microcontroller. Pull apart an old TV remote or bluetooth device, and look up the part numbers and what they do. There's not much to it. You have to remember that most of the stuff getting designed and built in South East Asia is done by people with zero qualifications. Electronics being "the thing that smart university people do" in the West is mostly a mental block, culturally constructed because people don't want their kids getting electrocuted so bombard them with constant threat of death if playing with electricity (which mostly isn't a worry anymore unless you're working with mains power).

The true discipline of Electronic Engineering is designing something that works for every eventuality and environment, with close to 100% reliability, at the very cutting edge of what is possible with the components we can afford while balancing physical and financial constraints. That's something which takes years of both academic study and industrial experience.

[123pie123]

"Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill."

very good recommendation, that book help me turn my studies in to reality

electronic circuit emulators will help with the basics as well (eg https://www.falstad.com/circuit/)

[amelius]

Note that AoE is not an academic book, more a book for tinkerers.

I'd recommend also to play with https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

[RossBencina]

> Honestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics

I got this advice in 1998. I have the book. I found it useful for the "art" part. It got me through the projects that I was working on at the time, but personally it didn't help me with the fundamentals. Paraphrasing what has been said on this site many times in the past: AoE is a great first book in practical electronics if you already have an undergraduate degree in physics. I showed my brother AoE when he was building guitar pedals and he couldn't make sense of it and said it was obviously assuming things that he didn't know (he had no high-school science background).

There are a lot of potential and/or assumed pre-requistites even for basic electronics: high school physics, first-year calculus, maybe a differential equations course, certainly familiarity with complex numbers. As I understand it EEs take vector calculus and classical electromagnetism, that's a long road for self-study. For that reason it's hard to give general advice about where to begin.

For someone starting out I think the first things to study are DC and then AC analysis of passive circuits (networks of resistors, capacitors, inductors), starting with networks of resistors. Ohms Law, what current and voltage actually mean, some basic introduction to the physics passive components. This is the basics, and I don't see AoE getting anyone over this hump. This could be learnt in many ways, electronics technicians and amateur radio people know this stuff -- there are no doubt courses outside university both on line and in person. If we're talking books, get a second hand copy of Grob's "Basic Electronics." Once that's covered you can move on to semiconductors. I can recommend Malvino's "Electronic Principles," but this book won't teach you about resistors, capacitors and inductors. After that I think the Art of Electronics would be approachable. And also more specialised topics like digital design or operational amplifier circuits.

A book that usually gets a mention is Paul Scherz "Practical Electronics for Inventors." I got that book later, I personally found it a bit overwhelming with the mixture of really basic practical stuff combined with more advanced circuit theory, but it's no doubt popular for a reason.

Another standard recommendation is to buy one ARRL Handbook from each decade (I have 1988), the older ones have less advanced (hence more accessible) material. But reading the "Electronics Fundamentals" chapter is no substitute for Grob and Malvino.

[cadr]

Seconding an old ARRL handbook.

[123pie123]

there's a few youtube channels that are nice to watch to get you more interested in electronics, my two favourite are:

Bigclivedotcom (nice, basic fun) : https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom/videos

Mend it Mark (more advanced) :https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos

[angra_mainyu]

Personally I preferred Boylestad as well as Sedra & Smith.

Boylestad was an excellent first look at electronics with S&S being great for going in-depth on some topics.

[kalinkochnev]

I want to add that Moritz Klein's DIY synthesizer videos are top notch, especially for beginners in electronics. As somebody who is just working through AoE it feels like a great compliment and is very satisfying.

[utopiah]

Before you dive too deep, check what's already available and let your tinker TODAY without having to solder anything. You can still do so, even design PCB and get them mailed to you (like I did, it's fun) but honestly spend a bit of time (and money) on CrowdSupply to see the plethora of fun and useful OSHW out there. IMHO only after having considered what's beyond the usual consumer electronics it is worth learning to build, not before.

[candiddevmike]

Is there any prototyping software you'd recommend that could do this? I'd like to play with this stuff virtually without having to spend meatspace time/money.

[utopiah]

Ah, funnily enough I'm a prototypist software by trade... but I have NO idea about that, none. Honestly you can find emulator, simulators, etc but typically those devices precisely only make sense because the emulated equivalents do not. For example I just received a DeepDeck ... it's "just" a macropad, so basically a glorified partial keyboard. It's OSHW and open source so you "could" run the Web stack locally to "configure" it ... and yet you'll never know what it "feels" like to turn a physical knob in order to navigate between browser tabs. You can imagine doing it ... but it's still quite different.

Anyway there are plenty of things like https://wokwi.com and it's fun ... but it's NOT like the actual hardware. Most of those projects precisely make sense because of the tangible aspect, or because you support a "vision" (e.g. Precursor) and learn while tinkering with them.

So... no unfortunately sorry I don't have any recommendation for doing this virtually. Maybe it exists but I'd caution against thinking it's equivalent.

[CheeseFromLidl]

I’m going to go against the standard advice of this book or that course.

Pick up (broken) equipment and start disassembling it to figure out how they turn A into B [1]. Go down the rabbit hole of hunting down the service manual of the thing or one of its siblings. Look at how the pcbs follow the same pattern in competing design. Look at how all the yamaha, sony, medion, … amplifier/tuners are made in the same way and learn from it. Notice that one that is costlier and has those few quircks in its design. Notice how different variations of a theme achieve the same result, but died out because the tech doesn’t scale or simply proved to be suboptimal. Try to repair your broken equipment by understanding the path that the signals and power lines follow.

Rinse and repeat a few years and you’ll get a grasp on what the innards of an unknown electronic thing looks like without opening it. Then open it and be amazed that there was a different, cheaper, simpler way to turn A into B.

All along the way you’ll experience that most educational resources aren’t actually that good at explaining, or that they follow a different school of mathematical notation, or that they’re really good at explaining this detail but the rest is missing.

Design your own pcbs. Remember that - like software - hardware design is iterative. Remember that - unlike software - hardware iterations cost money.

Hope this helps.

[1] the ways to turn A into B are rather limited and it relies heavily on electromagnetism and conservation of energy.

[ghm2199]

I think you can take a bit more directed approach too.

You can build a micro-controller with a circuit that controls a stepper motor. Let the motor do something simple/fun. Connect the fun doohikie to give feedback to the microcontroller — e.g. using some kind of an encoder chip that converts motor's rotation amount to numbers that will tell the microcontroller how much to move, initialize the doohikie's start state.

But you can understand a lot more if you don't use the HBridge chip for the motor. Build the bridge circuit yourself. Build your own power supply for the microcontroller too(if you want to).

You can pick a path to go down on and focus on specific parts:

1. For the h bridge there is lots to learn. Designing the operational amp for D2A conversion as well as amplification/signal modeling — which you will need for the motor for current limiting in the h bridge per motor spec for the doohickie you want to power — That will teach you quite a bit about analog electronics and design. What kind of currents you need to protect and how e.g. using opto electronics. Limiting noise from power supply and parasitic noise so that your circuit does not misfire. You will likely need a set up of an oscilloscope, soldering irons and breadboards to prototype. Learn some basics from a book about design then go back to the circuit and build.

2. If you build your own PCB for this. It is a multi month project. You can learn a out CAD and chip layout. But I think you can do this in parts for example you can design the initial PCB only for the digital components and then connect it to a breadboard where you can prototype the H bridge you want.

3. If you choose to learn digital design and embedded system programming then maybe you can build the tougher analog parts for motor control using store-bought components and chips and focus mostly on the programming the microcontroller. That is a totally legitimate part too. You could use an old MCS-51 microcontroller and learn about data and program memory addressing and interrupt handling from scratch.

[drob518]

Forty years ago, I was on my way to college to get a computer engineering degree. I had already been programming in 6502 assembly language and was frustrated that I didn’t understand the hardware side of things as much as I understood the software side of things. Best decision I made. It allowed me to view computation as something more abstract. The barrier between hardware and software processing is artificial and can be moved one way or the other. What is CPU microcode, for instance, hardware or software? It’s really low level software that is typically burned into a ROM but is also sometimes downloaded. Even if you decide to stay with software as your primary day to day job, you’ll be comfortable talking to engineers on the other side of the line and that will help inform your understanding of what’s possible, how much it will cost to design and ship it, how long it will take, and how it will perform.

[estimator7292]

I found that programming concepts map really well to digital electronics. The objects in your object oriented language are real objects with their own internal physical state. A large fraction of what embedded engineers do is just APIs and protocols.

Controversial opinion but you do not need to learn electronics to have a good time. One can have plenty of fun simply writing software and plugging prebuilt modules together on a breadboard. Ohm and Maxwell need not apply.