
Why Learn Basic Electronics? [video] - gbugniot
http://www.eevblog.com/2015/05/27/eevblab-10-why-learn-basic-electronics
======
Johnythree
Once upon a time, there was a huge hobby interest in Electronics. Kids were
building Radios and Stereos, and then studying for their Ham license and
building Transmitters, etc. Many of those kids went on to a professional
career in Electronics.

For a while there was huge interest in building small microprocessor systems,
but then along came the desktop PC revolution and this attracted a completely
different crowd. A distinct separation developed between homebrew electronics
and computer hacking.

The saying, "Beware computer programmers carrying a screwdriver" was only half
in jest.

So today the Hacker movement is starting all over again, but they seem
completely unaware that a generation or two of Hardware Hackers already
exists.

Me, I'm retired now. I started out as a Ham radio enthusiast, later became an
RF Engineer, then went on to Circuit design and PC layout, then DSP and
Assembler language in Embedded systems. But towards the end of my career I
found it harder and harder to find employment as manufacturing dried up.
Eventually I just gave up and retired.

Bottom line is that Electronics is an interesting hobby, but I wouldn't
recommend it for a career.

Just one further note: Lately I've been spending time in Asia: If you go into
the smallest bookshop (eg in rural Thailand) you'll see local electronic
magazines, complete with free kits and PCBs etc stapled on the cover. In Asia,
Electronics is now a very trendy subject with schoolkids.

Here, kids are labelled as "nerds" if they show an interest in any science
based hobby. Perhaps that is beginning to change. I do hope so.

~~~
justaman
I think "nerd" no longer has a negative connotation, at least not as
impactful. The coolest kid in school is the kid who can get past the browser
filters.

~~~
Vexs
Haha, true. Computers are so mainstream now versus the 60s-90s that being a
nerd (or rather, geek) is a positive benefit in the right circumstances. They
provide a service that is basically the hottest commodity around these days.

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tlrobinson
Discrete electronic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors, simple ICs
and sensors, etc) are sort of the "assembly language" of electronics, but the
vast majority of programmers never touch assembly.

There have been attempts to create higher level abstractions (like Arduino
"shields", etc) but the cost (time and money) to produce reusable modules is
huge relative to the cost of the components, whereas CPUs are so fast the
overhead of higher level languages and function calls is usually
insignificant.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe better software, and methods of
manufacturing small runs of boards?

~~~
amelius
> Discrete electronic components are sort of the "assembly language" of
> electronics

Yes, but to make the analogy more realistic, it is an assembly language for a
relatively simple and very slow and inefficient, power-consuming processor.

Nowadays, with discrete electronics components, one unfortunately cannot make
fast and lean electronics like any of the big companies are making.

~~~
vvanders
If you're using discrete components for digital processor, sure.

However they still have a very real application in the analog domain(along
with a strong understanding of discrete ICs like Opamps and Transistors).

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vvanders
Dave Jones is great.

I've found that learning about FPGAs and DDR access timings/commands was
really a crystallizing in understanding why there are pipelines, cache misses
and how to wring out real performance from a system.

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gshrikant
I feel another reason why discrete electronics isn't as 'trendy' now as it was
before, is because of how products seem to be 'seamlessly integrated'
nowadays. There is nothing to take apart or repair.

A side benefit of hobbyist electronics was the ability to repair broken
electronics lying around the house (simple radios, alarms and what-not). With
stuff increasingly becoming a single 'product' instead of an assembly of
discrete pieced together parts - both in terms of their circuits and their
mechanical construction, there is little incentive for that kind of
exploratory learning.

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eddd
He forgot about one thing though: "How to learn this stuff?" I did some very
basic electronics in my CS class, but since then I didn't touch anything
hardware-like. I would love to see a widely accepted and relatively short
introduction to this.

To me the difference between electronics and programming is that with code I
can do something that works very quickly. Whereas in electronics I would have
to go through the whole 900 pages book before making something that works.

I might be wrong - maybe there is some path that I would take - I didn't look
up very closely. And please don't say hardware is hard - General relativity
theory is hard, but I manage to understand it because It is simply explained
in many places over the internet.

~~~
codesushi42
It's not hard to get started. Pick up Make: Electronics to learn the basics by
example. Each chapter walks you through a project that teaches some important
concepts. [http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-
Pla...](http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-
Platt/dp/0596153740/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434448925&sr=8-1&keywords=make+electronics)

And to get started with Arduino, you can simply buy a starter kit:
[http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Starter-Official-170-page-
Proj...](http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Starter-Official-170-page-
Projects/dp/B009UKZV0A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434448980&sr=8-1&keywords=arduino+kit)

I actually think it's easier for most people to get started with electronics
than with code. This is coming from someone with 13 years coding experience
and who has only been working on hobby electronics for the past 2 years.

Electronics projects don't have the same amount of boilerplate you see with
writing code today. Development tools, frameworks, dependency management, the
commandline, polyglot projects etc hinder a lot of beginners at the start. I
would say you need to read 900 pages before you can fully understand
everything that goes into developing a trivial CRUD website. With electronics,
you just plug in and start learning. Learn the functions of a lot of different
components and then come up with something that uses them together. Ohm's law
is most of what you /need/ to know to design a basic circuit. You can derive
what you need with the help of V=IR e.g. voltage dividers, components in
series, parallel. And you need to learn how to read schematics and datasheets.

The theory behind everything you do is deep if you want to venture into
electromagnetism, which is IMO deeper than what you would expect from college
level CS. But it's not necessary to have a deep understanding of it in
practice. Though you could say the same about a lot of software engineering
and its relation to CS. :)

~~~
codesushi42
BTW if you are interested in learning some of the theory, check out Practical
Electronics for Inventors:

[http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-
Paul-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Paul-
Scherz/dp/0071771336/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1434450499&sr=8-2&keywords=practical+electronics)

------
metaprinter
I've been working with
[http://www.snapcircuits.net/](http://www.snapcircuits.net/) Snap Circuits
with my kids since they were 4years old. The lessons they learned there are
used to this date and i think invaluable, especially now that they are trying
to get things to move and light up using an arduino. I recommend checking out
their kits, they can be used all the way up to HS level, heck I still like
using them and showing them off to other parents.

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nathan_f77
As a programmer, I find electronic circuits insanely hard to reason about.
It's like looking at a computer program where every single line runs
concurrently. Maybe I need to approach it from a different angle.

But I love it, and I learned a ton when I was hacking away on my microwave
[1].

[1] [http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-
micr...](http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-microwave/)

~~~
amelius
In my experience, electronics is usually much simpler than software, because
every component only talks to a few other components, you can put probes into
it pretty easily, the "data" you are working with is incredibly simple (you
only have voltages, currents and power). Sure, it gets more complicated with
things like processor design where you have pipelines that can be flushed, and
branch prediction and that kind of stuff. But that is more software than
hardware anyway.

~~~
wyc
In software, you're guaranteed that 2 + 2 is perfectly 4 in an int32. It's a
very clean abstraction. In hardware, operational amplifiers are affected by
thermal noise, magnetic fields, parasitic capacitance, etc. It is not
"incredibly simple", and although there are only a handful of inputs you
/want/ to care about in that operational amplifier, the actual number of
inputs you have to worry about increases dramatically as you chase
performance, higher frequencies, and compactness.

Processors must implement logic that can be represented by software, yes.
However, when you're trying to push multiple GHz on nanometer technology, that
implementation becomes especially difficult. I recommend picking up an RF
engineering book, as it will only begin to describe the noise and side-effects
that must be accounted for in those circumstances. There's a reason that Intel
has physicists on staff. If hardware was truly easier than software, then we'd
probably be building our web and mobile apps in that.

~~~
amelius
You are right that there are different problems. But designing high-frequency
amplifiers, mixers, and such can now even be done by computers using
optimization techniques such as genetic algorithms. The design space is quite
limited, compared to software.

> If hardware was truly easier than software, then we'd probably be building
> our web and mobile apps in that.

I think this is more a matter of cost and flexibility.

------
jilted
Agree with Johnythree. I used to be an electronics technician over 12 years
ago. What happened is that it became cheaper to replace a board than to pay a
skilled technician to debug components on a board.

You also had to pretty much learn whatever setup a company's products had on
the job, as typically this was proprietary information.

There are great boards/kits out today but yes, it's mostly a hobbyist thing
unless you decide to go embedded, then boards such as the MSP-430 from Texas
Instruments can be a good choice (especially in the Medical Devices field).

------
rcknr
This is a great blog about electronics! I remember I needed to solder
something and wasn't sure I can do it, so I searched for some tutorials on
Youtube and came across this guy's series about soldering. He shows very well
how easy it is to solder once you get to know a few techniques of dealing with
solder and tools. And Australian accent adds an entertaining bit to it, so
it's never boring.

------
ethana
I took electronics classes during high school and loved it. I remember
tinkering around and making blinkers and noise generators. But after I got
into making websites for fun, I completely abandoned electronics as an
academic route. There's part of me that wish I didn't, maybe I should get back
to it as a hobby.

~~~
cellularmitosis
You should get back into it! Since you've left the hobby, a revolution has
taken place in PCB manufacturing which allows for minimum quantities as low as
3 for the cost of a pizza or two. PCB design has truly become a hobbyist
activity in the past 5 years or so.

~~~
wfunction
Would you mind pointing me to something that explains what has happened in the
last 5 years that made PCB design so much cheaper? It's quite surprising to
read.

~~~
cellularmitosis
Years ago, if you wanted a small PCB manufactured, your only option was to
deal directly with the board manufacturer and the minimum order was 100's or
1000's of boards. Prototyping a one-off hobbyist design was totally out of the
question.

About 5 years ago a few startups figured out that if you played a large game
of Tetris by combining the board designs of many hobbyists, you could submit
the order as a single, giant PCB in a quantity of 10, or 5, or even 3. When
the manufactured boards arrived, you break up the individual designs and mail
them out individually to all of the hobbyists.

~~~
wfunction
Whoa, interesting, thanks!

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stevenspasbo
Electronics are something I've been interested in for a while, but I'm not
really sure where to start. I have an arduino uno and some LEDs, but does
anyone know of any good resources for beginners?

~~~
whizse
Make: Electronics is a great introduction and a lot of fun.
[http://www.makershed.com/products/make-electronics-
book](http://www.makershed.com/products/make-electronics-book)

~~~
reidrac
I liked reading it but I think I made a mistake getting it for Kindle instead
the paper version; I'm not good using the ebook reader for reference material.

The projects are OK-ish, though. Still a good book.

------
empressplay
Growing up in the 80s I had those silly "electronics kits" from Radio Shack
where you ran wires between various components to do things. At the same time
I was learning BASIC and LOGO and stuff -- I think they were fairly
complementary. I wonder if they still make those things?

~~~
codesushi42
There are, but now they usually bundle a microcontroller like Arduino. There
are tons of them on Sparkfun, Adafruit, and Jameco.

