Good afternoon everyone. I am a complete noobie when it comes to electronics and the most exposure I've ever had is changing a fuse in a plug socket. Nevertheless I do have some questions, mostly for curiosity.
When you guys develop "devices" do you buy every component individually and solder them into a circuit board, connect it upto a computer and program the hardware or is it more general than that? When I told my mum I was going to build my own computer, she laughed because she didn't really understand that you just buy the components and plug them into a board.
The point I'm getting at is do you have to "invent" your own parts or is most of the stuff already built? Close to where I live is a university that has a computer science and electronic engineering department. I went in there and used their equipment (sshhh!) and they had these small ARM controllers connected to computers and with the aid of some books from the library, I managed to program one of the controllers using C and eclipse. The controller had an LCD display and some lights and I just made the lights turn on in a certain order and made the LCD display countdown from 100 and just very basic things.
this is what it looked like.
Anyway sorry for going off on a tangent but basically my question is do you guys buy pre-built boards and just change the code or do you literally build the boards yourself? With the transisters, the little batteries, the soldering, all those tiny little parts on the board and do god only knows what....
When you guys develop "devices" do you buy every component individually and solder them into a circuit board, connect it upto a computer and program the hardware or is it more general than that? When I told my mum I was going to build my own computer, she laughed because she didn't really understand that you just buy the components and plug them into a board.
The point I'm getting at is do you have to "invent" your own parts or is most of the stuff already built? Close to where I live is a university that has a computer science and electronic engineering department. I went in there and used their equipment (sshhh!) and they had these small ARM controllers connected to computers and with the aid of some books from the library, I managed to program one of the controllers using C and eclipse. The controller had an LCD display and some lights and I just made the lights turn on in a certain order and made the LCD display countdown from 100 and just very basic things.
Anyway sorry for going off on a tangent but basically my question is do you guys buy pre-built boards and just change the code or do you literally build the boards yourself? With the transisters, the little batteries, the soldering, all those tiny little parts on the board and do god only knows what....