[danilocampos]

You're embarrassed by a successful entrepreneur?

Can you explain to me what is embarrassing to you?

Is it the making money part?

Is it the understanding a market and serving it part?

Is it the education and knowledge sharing to better energize and expand the market part?

Is it the persistence, perseverance and timing part?

Is it the creation of a legion of folks who never would have participated had they not been given the encouragement and clear marketplace part?

Is it the successful marketing part?

Or is it some other part that I have failed to mention? We live in a world where people made billions selling tobacco, blood diamonds, sub-prime mortgages and Justin Bieber albums. But even without those, I can see very little embarrassing about an entrepreneur channeling passion into advocacy and sales of products customers clearly value.

[meaty]

Yes I will.

I find it embarrassing in the same way as I find computer science portrayals in movies embarrassing. Hax0r the planet etc...

Making money - selling overpriced modules and branded crap for way more than marginal profit (compared to say RS/Farnell/Digikey) and shipping an identity rather than tools to solve problems.

Understanding the market - actually they created a new market full of flashing LED cube machines and crap which actually performs no useful function other than to make other participants in the marketed identity look cool. About the most intelligent use for all of this I've seen (which isn't served elsewhere) is a computer controlled cannabis farm and that isn't exactly going to serve the intelligence of the person who built it well [1]

Education - there is very little going on there. Every person I've seen jump into this comes crawling to me for advice but then shits a brick the moment something more complicated than a 4 banger calculator is pulled. You know what a complex number is right? What do you mean you don't understand why that 10 ohm 1/4W resistor smoked across a 12v source - do you know what Ohms law is? The answer is usually "no - we just googled and copied the picture".

Persistence, perseverance, timing? None are relevant.

Marketing - the bugbear of the whole thing. They created an identity which actually serves the participants badly.

Actually you just nailed it - it is equivalent to selling Justin Bieber albums.

[1] Sub-rant - the hacks I've seen people use including twist-n-tape mains cables are going to kill someone one day...

[danilocampos]

> Persistence, perseverance, timing? None are relevant.

Says the guy who gave up the space way back in the 90's while others get magazine stories. Sour grapes are rough man, I'm sorry. But you only embarrass yourself went you vent it so publicly.

I won't bother with the rest. You're deriving a lot of self-esteem from your knowledge of things that others don't have. But rather than rejoicing in the spread of that knowledge, you resent anyone who dilutes its scarcity.

People start small. Things aren't easy. Not everyone gets to the end. But I'm glad there are those who are willing to roll the dice and hope they can make a bit of money bridging a very wide gulf of knowledge and know-how.

[meaty]

Hardly. I put the kits together in my spare time in the interest of spreading knowledge. The designs were open and published in a magazine in the UK as well. I don't do it any more because I am too damn busy, but the moment I retire,

I'm not driving self esteem - I'm just well equipped to say that you can't start without knowing the basics. I actually spent nearly 8 years as an engineering mentor, teaching others so I spread my knowledge. I also sit and help people but to be honest sometimes it's hopeless as they just don't have the fundamentals and aren't interested.

My problem is that the fundamentals are completely wiped out by the whole Maker movement in favour of short-cutting and getting things done, regardless of how dangerous or stupid they are.

[daeken]

> I'm just well equipped to say that you can't start without knowing the basics

I went from not knowing anything beyond hooking an LED up to a battery, to being published in EDN (for my brain-computer interface hacking) and talking at BlackHat (for my electronic lock hacking) in the space of a year. I didn't do it by learning the fundamentals -- I did it by jumping in and experimenting. I screwed up along the way, repeatedly, but I learned it very well.

Any time you say "you can't start without <insert learning method here>", you're almost definitely wrong, unless your goal is to be a surgeon.

[daemon13]

Don't get discouraged by nasty replies.

Unfortunately, I observe the same trend - the whole generation of current 15-20 are shortcutting as a life style. Instead of engineering/making things, I observe this in other areas - finance, economics, accounting, math, stats... Sad to say my son is a good example here.

[meaty]

I work in the financial services sector now. We see the same thing with maths, stats and finance as well as electronics. People can't even do basic projection calculations such as TVM because they don't know what a logarithm is.

True knowledge is rotting.

The only advantage is that if you know your shit, then you're in an incredibly better situation than anyone else.

[ptorrone]

@meaty you say "I work in the financial services sector now".

with all your potential to teach and share your vast electronics knowledge, why stick around in finance? there isn't enough people willing to dedicate their time helping. snarky-commenting on hackernews does not change things - actual work does. write some articles, posting tutorials and ship cool kits - join in!

[ryanhuff]

You forgot the "get off my lawn" bit. But, honestly, young kids these days want the fast feedback, and the likes of Ida help make the hobby approachable.

[memset]

I am a software engineer who dabbles in hardware. I know all about OS, algorithms, how to prevent deadlock, how to throw together a jquery web page, etc etc. And I have a rudimentary understanding of electronics. Enough to put together kits and follow tutorials.

But there is a definite upper ceiling I hit for the projects I want to build because I don't have the background. Complex numbers, signal processing, etc - I don't have any of that fundamental stuff as a software guy.

I can write assembler, but I get nervous when trying to implement a PWM because I just don't get it.

It is frustrating to try to learn. All of the kits and guides are tailored for newcomers. I don't even know where to begin as someone who is fairly technically competent, and who has debugging skills, but is missing a chunk of math and theory and rote practice relevant for hardware hacking. Do you know how long it took me to figure out what "Vcc" meant on a datasheet?

So guys like me love these modules because it lets me create my raspberry pi party trick that responds to tweets. (blog post forthcoming.) Or my MIDI-controlled glockenspiel. But your point stands that there is a whole world of innovation that I can conceive of, but cannot put into practice, because you can only go so far with an Ethernet shield.

My raspberry pi twitter device ran out of batteries halfway through the party - I don't know enough to design something more efficient.

So. While I can agree with your points, short of enrolling in my local EE program, what is one to do?

[meaty]

Knowing where to look and what order to do things in is the key to success on this. Without understanding in a reasonable order you're screwed, hence your Vcc problem. If you dredge through the basics up to BJTs, you would suddenly realise that it's "voltage common collector" (or +v). This kind of demonstrates my point. This is no personal reflection of your progress - just an observation.

With all the free resources out there, it's probably best to do the following. This is my personal recommendation and it's what I throw people towards who want a solid understanding of the subject:

1. Start with Khan Academy and do at least up to the end of Linear Algebra. Make sure you cover trig as well. Do the first few sections on arithmetic with a calculator or skip them if you can't be bothered. Arithmetic isn't all that important in maths. Grab a reasonably new Casio calc with solver and calculus functions such as FX-991ES as well.

2. Pick up the NEETS guides from [1] and work through the first module [2] until you get a rough understanding of what electricity is. Some eye openers in there which surprise a lot of people.

3. Grab a copy of "the art of electronics" and the associated student guide and work through the latter using the former as a reference ONLY (seriously the latter is an awesome book which contains some real practical hints and tips that are missing from everything else). The main art of electronics is a disjoint mess of information but the student guide uses the right approach.

4. Move slowly to AC circuits, referring back to Khan Academy if you get stuck on the maths and NEETS as the fundamental information.

5. Rinse and repeat. You will be able to chose your own path when you get through those bits.

Also, best advice in the world - buy an analogue oscilloscope - an old 25MHz one can be had on ebay for virtually nothing. It doesn't have to be a nice one - just something that works. I've got one that is 35 years old that is fine - it cost me $20! Ignore those digital ones - they're a piece of shit unless you want to spend upwards of $500.

You can probably do the whole series in a year or so with $100-200 investment which is less than an iPhone.

If you get royally stuck, visit http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/ and there are plenty of us who will help you out.

[1] http://www.phy.davidson.edu/instrumentation/NEETS.htm

[2] When I say work through the modules, I mean buy some components and actually build some stuff and play with it rather than just mindlessly sap up the theory.

[r0s]

It's totally unfair to compare margins between gigantic wholesalers and some small hobby kit seller.

Building for entertainment isn't useless or somehow less important than making useful tools to solve problems. Remember what fun was like? Some people enjoy making simple toys.

[rdl]

Paint by numbers is totally acceptable as a way to learn the mechanics of painting. Them, like you do with her kits, use the paints and brushes left over to do you own variations, then independent projects.

[Codhisattva]

I just was in an artist's studio where he was working on several very large commissioned stained glass windows. Numbers everywhere.

[revdinosaur]

I take issue with the suggestion that there is very little education going on, specifically with regard to Adafruit. The tutorials on the site do not go into complete depth when discussing every project they post but the content they produced sets them apart in my mind from, say, MAKE who put their content behind a paywall. They also tend to link excellent resources for addressing topics at a lower level.

[TeMPOraL]

> that 10 ohm 1/4W resistor smoked across a 12v source

Hahah, that's exactly the configuration I used to make fuses for rocket engines we were building with friend in high school. 10 ohm resistor on 12V burned quite nicely - and well enough to ignite the fuel.

[meaty]

Yes indeed - the same :) They were cheaper than Estes igniters as well!