I had a conversation with a fellow colleague, who is also interested in electronics. We are both pretty much at the same stage, just getting into this hobby.

We talked about Arduino, we both own one, but haven't really started playing with it yet. I said there are like a 100 projects in the book, just to get things started. He thought following those projects was just like just following a recipe, and not really a learning experience. It's as if though he thought it was cheating, if you followed an instruction, and things had to be made from scratch (I'm sure he didn't include IC's)

This got me thinking. What is the "best" way to get into this hobby? Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

 

Your goal will determine your need. What all do you want to do with your hobby? Is the understanding of the function just as important as the successful completion of the function?

Understanding is NOT necessary for results. Only procedure is.

 

Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

Technically it helps to have a basic understanding of these basic components and how they react in a DC and AC environment, R,L,C etc and how they respond to frequency, tuned circuits and lagging/leading phase angles/currents etc.
What is the difference between inductance and impedance/inductive reactance etc.
Basics are important in order to move forward.
Max.

 

Welcome to AAC!

What is the "best" way to get into this hobby?

There is no "best" way. Everyone has different skills and objectives.

Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

The way I look at it is to become good at anything, you need to have a good foundation to build upon.

To use your recipe analogy, many people can cook following a recipe. They could rightly call themselves cooks (able to cook following directions; assuming they don't under/over cook). But if they wanted to create new recipes (be a chef instead of a cook), they'd need to have an understanding of what goes well together and why certain ingredients are used.

For example, I like beef tomato (a Chinese dish). One of the ingredients is sugar. If you don't understand that the quantity of sugar used depends on the acidity of the tomatoes, getting the sweetness "right" will be hit or miss.

If you'll be satisfied building things without actually being able to design, do whatever is easiest. If you want to understand why things were done a certain way, you need to learn the basics (and that can take years).

 

I had a conversation with a fellow colleague, who is also interested in electronics. We are both pretty much at the same stage, just getting into this hobby.

We talked about Arduino, we both own one, but haven't really started playing with it yet. I said there are like a 100 projects in the book, just to get things started. He thought following those projects was just like just following a recipe, and not really a learning experience. It's as if though he thought it was cheating, if you followed an instruction, and things had to be made from scratch (I'm sure he didn't include IC's)

This got me thinking. What is the "best" way to get into this hobby? Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

The best way is the way that YOU will find sufficiently satisfying to keep YOU going and progressing.

It's a very individual thing.

Having said that, very few people learn to play a saxophone, having never touched any musical instrument previously, by composing their own music and then pressing some buttons and covering some holes and blowing into a mouthpiece because they think that it's cheating to read a book that shows them how to blow into the mouthpiece and which buttons/holes to work in order to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

For most people wanting to learn electronics, especially if you are doing it on your own, doing projects that have been put together by others is a very good way to go about it. You get to see some of the kinds of things that can be done and how they can be accomplished. You also start learning about the various components involved and also some of the subtle gotchas that can be anything but readily apparent (such as switch debouncing and bypass capacitors). At each stage you can, and should, experiment to see if you can take the author's project and modify it to do something different. At first it might be little more than changing a resistor value and observing how the behavior changes and later it should become seeing if you can figure out what changes to make in order to create a desired change in behavior. As you proceed you want to get more and more confident that you know why each component (or line of code) is there. Then start trying to make bigger and bigger changes to the circuit to get it to do something significantly different from what the original circuit was intended to do.

 

Watching this thread with interest as I am struggling with the same issue. What to study, what to work on, how to study, etc. My personal electronics goal is to be able to build a vacuum tube amplifier. I have built a few small circuits but they were merely "put part A in holes A' etc. I doubt that I would ever be able to design one. However if it or other electronic devices stop working ( I have a Nad tuner that has stopped working ), I want to be to able to diagnose and fix them.
My soldering skills have improved, though de-soldering is still a mess.
My interest is kept alive by being able to build stuff plus there are so many kewl tools and test instruments to buy.

 

Arduino is great because it makes things really simple for someone just starting out. The examples expose you to some of the things that are possible, and from a high enough level that it's reasonably easy to understand and get involved. The learning really starts when you want to make something that isn't covered by an example, or is slightly different from an example. That's when you need to dig to see what's really happening inside that library that is doing all the work for you, and see what the hardware is doing at the low level so that you can adapt it for what you really need. Everyone has to start somewhere. The examples are a good place to start, try to understand what they are doing on the low level, then try to make something not covered by an example. This is a great way to learn.

 

Thanks for all the replies.

It could be worth mentioning that I (and the other guy) am a marine engineer, so we had a great deal of electrical calculations in school (Ohm's, Kirschoff's, Thevenin..) which I liked a lot. But 98% of my work consists of other things than working with circuits. And If I am so lucky, it's usually just an isolation/earth fault.

@BR-549 Good question. I don't really have a "need" right now, other than I would like to understand circuits better, how they operate. And eventually I would like to build a miniature model ship with dynamic positioning. I'd say understanding > functioning, though I don't mind when things work.

@MaxHeadRoom This really reminds me that I need to brush up my AC theory. I need to find something to play with in AC form, everything I've bought so far is geared towards DC.

@dl324 I like your cooking analogy. I wanna be a master chef And I will have to start in the small, following a few different recipes.

@WBahn Building something from instructions then changing the values sounds like a very good way to observe changes, and getting to know each component, analyzing the circuit on paper as you go. Certainly something I will try.

I have bought all the components to an homemade 8-bit computer, which I found a recipe online by Ben Eater. Not so much electronics involved, but sure many IC's, which I also find interesting.

 

@Hextejas Glad I could attract others in the same situation

@MrSoftware Could you elaborate when you say "understand what they are doing on the low level"?

 

@MrSoftware Could you elaborate when you say "understand what they are doing on the low level"?

From my perspective as it pertains to microprocessors in general, is to learn the 'natural' language so to speak, namely assembly, even if you go on to using a higher level language, it helps in trouble shooting.
I originally learned assembly on a PDP11 and 8085 and still prefer to use it with picmicro's.
Max.

 

Sure, I'm going to pull this example out of my backside so apologies if it's not technically correct, but you'll get the idea. Say you use an Arduino UNO to make a stop ligth with alarm. You need a red, yellow and green LED plus an audio sound. To conserve power you decide to PWM the LEDs, so happily you use some PWM library to create 3 outputs for the LEDs and it all works great. Then you use the same PWM library to create a new output for your piezo buzzer, and now nothing works. What happened? So now you dig in and figure out that the physical UNO hardware only has 3 hardware timers. You didn't have to know this before because the PWM library gave you a high level interface and hid all the low level hardware interaction from you. Can your project still work? Sure! But you need to understand the timers and figure out how to do multiple things with one timer, and presto you learned something.

 

@MaxHeadRoom I sorta kinda hoped I could steer around assembly, but your the second guy I talked to, who told me it was a good idea to have some understanding of it. Maybe my 8 bit computer project might help with that.

@MrSoftware Yet another example of knowing low level stuff is useful But I don't know any coding language at all, so assembly is pure gibberish, when I look at it.

 

I had a conversation with a fellow colleague, who is also interested in electronics. We are both pretty much at the same stage, just getting into this hobby.

We talked about Arduino, we both own one, but haven't really started playing with it yet. I said there are like a 100 projects in the book, just to get things started. He thought following those projects was just like just following a recipe, and not really a learning experience. It's as if though he thought it was cheating, if you followed an instruction, and things had to be made from scratch (I'm sure he didn't include IC's)

This got me thinking. What is the "best" way to get into this hobby? Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

How many years do you plan on spending on this hobby? Yes first are the basics, and they will take at least 3 years of intensive study.

You will learn nothing from Arduino.

 

Yet another example of knowing low level stuff is useful

Useful, but not required unless you're good enough to write more efficient code than readily available compilers.

I learned assembly language for 3 architectures; can't say it does me much good these days. I write most of my code in C and don't worry much about the underlying hardware architecture; I prefer it that way.

 

Low level doesn't necessarily mean assembly. You typically have access to all of the hardware features using C or C++. If you don't know any languages, I would say first learn some C, then some C++, and spend time on the C/C++ preprocessor as you will encounter lots of preprocessor code with embedded projects.

I will respectfully disagree with @ArakelTheDragon comment about Arduino. Firstly Arduino is just a development board, typically with an Atmega processor, that they put a bootloader onto and developed very basic IDE for, then built a community around (lots of people to help makes things popular). They hide lots of the complicated bits from you which makes it easy to start on. But you once you start feeling spunky you can toss away their simplified tools and move to a more developer oriented IDE, such as Atmel Studio, erase the bootloader and program and debug the thing with a regular programmer (does Segger Flasher and J-Link work with the 328p?).

I've been coding for more than 20 years, but relatively new to embedded. It just happened that my first project used an Arduino, and from there I've done a couple of projects using Nordic processors. The learning curve for Nordic was very steep, but some of the things I learned with Arduino was helpful and I would not call that time wasted at all. There are some very capable and full featured development boards out there, by companies like Nordic, NXP, etc.. but as someone new to basically everything, the learning curve on those will be near vertical compared to the Arduino.

 

@MaxHeadRoom I sorta kinda hoped I could steer around assembly, but your the second guy I talked to, who told me it was a good idea to have some understanding of it. Maybe my 8 bit computer project might help with that.

Look at it this way, (I do!) If you try and converse with someone that speaks a foreign language to you, you can get a reasonable understanding by using a translation dictionary, but if you can converse at a common level, i.e. his/her language, then you understand the conversation and intent that much better.
Max.

 

It really depends on your objectives and the field you are interested in. In my case I have almost 10 years studying electronics and still feel in the shore of the sea. From 2008 to 2012, I spent 4 years in technical high school taking industrial electronics courses. Then in 2013 I started my bachelor degree in Electronics Engineering. I finish it this year. My objective is to become an electronics designer. In my country, for example, people that graduate from Electronics Engineering are not prepared to design and innovate, they just learn some practical and technical stuff and most of them end up working in industries as engineering technicians. I've had to put extra effort by myself to go beyond technical stuff and do more engineering.

As for Arduino itself, I've never done a project using it. I mean, using the board as it is and the Arduino IDE. So I can't tell much. I've programmed AVRs and PICs MCUs using registers. For now I usually program STM32 MCUs. All using C language. If you really want to go deep in Electronics, then Arduino is not for you. I'm not telling you not to use it, but if you have time you can play with it. You can take it as a first and brief step, but not to get stuck at it.

This got me thinking. What is the "best" way to get into this hobby? Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

Going for the basics is always a good idea.

 

I had a conversation with a fellow colleague, who is also interested in electronics. We are both pretty much at the same stage, just getting into this hobby.

We talked about Arduino, we both own one, but haven't really started playing with it yet. I said there are like a 100 projects in the book, just to get things started. He thought following those projects was just like just following a recipe, and not really a learning experience. It's as if though he thought it was cheating, if you followed an instruction, and things had to be made from scratch (I'm sure he didn't include IC's)

This got me thinking. What is the "best" way to get into this hobby? Do you first sit down and read about what a resistor, capacitor, transistor ect. ect. is, and then you progress forward?

Arduino projects will NOT help you learn or understand electronics, only about following instructions and fussing with programs, and using different names for things than the rest of people use.
There are a lot of introductory books available that will show you the relationships between voltage, current, and power, and then provide an introduction to circuit theory. Those are a very good way to start, because an understanding of the basics is needed before you can learn about the rest. Then you can seek out descriptions about how transistors work, and you are on your way. That sort of information is available in books and on line, and is where you should start. After that, places like this one have all sorts of questions and answers to learn from.

 

You will learn nothing from Arduino.

I really wish you'd quit saying that. It's quite tiresome, and simply not true. It's certainly not the best platform for every project, but you can learn a lot starting with Arduino projects.

If you want to offer constructive advice on better alternatives in any given situation, I would welcome that. I know a lot of microcontroller people here prefer the PIC family and can offer rational reasons for their preference. I also know a lot of people here prefer analog solutions when a microcontroller "isn't justified" and they too offer rational explanations for their preferences.

If you have something helpful to offer, please do so, but I'd you're just going to tell people Arduino is worthless without any explanation or alternative, please keep quiet.

 

I really wish you'd quit saying that. It's quite tiresome, and simply not true. It's certainly not the best platform for every project, but you can learn a lot starting with Arduino projects.

If you want to offer constructive advice on better alternatives in any given situation, I would welcome that. I know a lot of microcontroller people here prefer the PIC family and can offer rational reasons for their preference. I also know a lot of people here prefer analog solutions when a microcontroller "isn't justified" and they too offer rational explanations for their preferences.

If you have something helpful to offer, please do so, but I'd you're just going to tell people Arduino is worthless without any explanation or alternative, please keep quiet.

My statement is based on the projects that I have seen published in "Nuts and Volts", where almost every project could be done more simply with either analog or standard logic IC devices. And while it is certainly possible to use a microcontroller to provide the same functions as a LM339 comparator, for instance, it costs more, it takes up more space, and it requires a separate computer to create and load the code.
Besides that, the question was about how to learn ELECTRONICS, which is different than learning to write code. AND, I did offer quite a few very valid suggestions about what to learn and what resources to visit.