Background: I took some 100 and 200-level courses on electronics in college over a decade ago. I still remember some stuff (Ohm’s law, Kirchoff’s law), and I can recognise the basic parts in a circuit diagram.
I am also happy to pick up a beginner friendly text book and go through the theory by myself, if there are any recommendations.
However, I’ve never even held a soldering gun. I am a blank slate when it comes to any practical applications. I get overwhelmed trying to figure out what kit to order on Amazon.
So, is there a course/tutorial you’d recommend for learning the hands on parts of it? I’d prefer as much handholding as possible. Ex – if someone sells all the components to finish the projects in the course that would be the course I pick.
Wow, you couldn’t be more different than I am. Over the years, I’ve bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there’s better tutorials for things now than “make a bunch of LEDs blink in order”, so maybe the terrain is different.
There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.
It seems like kits are divided into “contains every part of a specific project” or “contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here’s a booklet of tutorials for some”. I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.
Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just “necropsies” on broken things to understand how they work.
Something that you’ll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the “premium” widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.
What you said makes sense. To provide context for why I am/was looking for the exact opposite –
I have a long string of failed hobbies and junk accumulated from all the stuff I’ve bought for them. I carry a ton of guilt because of this.
I guess I’m too hesitant to buy parts and have them lying around if I don’t end up using them all if I abandon this too. That’s the reason why I was hoping to buy a fixed set of parts for specific projects so that way I can at least convince myself that I used it all at least once.
Yeah, I definitely understand that. I certainly have things that I don’t use as much as I hoped (I’m staring at a solar panel doing nothing leaned against my wall). For me, I really need the resulting “thing” to be something that I will use/be excited about.
That’s why, for me, fixing stuff that’s broken, upgrading stuff, or repurposing stuff you already own is good. Replacing a worn out jack is a relatively simple task that can turn an expensive brick back into a nice thing.
The tools you need are not a very long list. You can get a cheap, crappy soldering iron for $6, solder for $4, a crappy multimeter for $7, and one of those magnifying glass/alligator clip things for $6 from harbor freight. Despite being poor quality, a lot can be accomplished with just those tools.
I ended up buying a bench power supply for like $40, but you can just get DC power supplies from the bin of assorted cords at your nearest thrift store for basically free.
Robotics can be dangerous, don’t jump into the deep end of robotics without learning how to use electronics first. Definitely start with electronics and move up to robotics once you have a lot of electronic failures under your belt. I would suggest that you keep robotics in mind as you learn.
Many people provided you with great places to start with electronics. Start there, because robotics are electronics with motion and that’s more dangerous. Motion can hurt someone or start a fire. Especially for as a hobby I’d be most concerned about accidentally starting a fire because of bad code and poor failure planning.
If you pick this up and get some experience with electronics, you’ll begin to understand a lot of the things that can go wrong with robotics before they start a fire. Also this can get very expensive, you will destroy components. It’s inevitable. I may be speaking from experience.
Thanks, fire safety concerns have definitely played a major role in why I haven’t actually started building stuff. I’ll keep this in mind.