Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I've had an idea for an online game that would secretly teach you circuit design. In the game, you would build a series of water pipes to preform a certain tasks for each level. The amount of water in a pipe would be voltage, and how fast the water flows would be current. The game would start off very simply, and after "beating" a level, you would get more devices available to complete the tasks.
Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#12It would be quite a huge book. The topic area is more broad than you'd think, although not at all impenetrable. I don't know if any such comprehensive text exists. All of the books I used, I found to be quite poor and limited in scope compared to books in other fields. I think it's easy to see why. Frequently I'd just read everything I could scattered around the internet. Maybe you have a more narrow goal for what yo…
I am worried about breadth vs depth issues. It's probably why people get degrees in this. :) I'm sorry if I made it sound like I thought it was trivial. I'm not in any hurry, though; The Hardware Hacking books from O'Reilly are ok but not .. I dunno, "enough". The "Teach Yourself .." book is pretty dense...
You would get the most out of taking the freshman/sophomore level electric circuit analysis series from either your local community college or university. in the lab that goes with the course you can use the o-scopes, function generators, etc. if you like it then take the analog design classes where you really get into active filter and circuit design first at the op amp level then transistor.
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#13I didn't know much about this stuff either here are some websites I found that were helpful in getting me started.
http://www.sparkfun.com has a lot of cool electronics type stuff to learn with. http://www.batchpcb.com to manufacture custom circuit board designs for cheap (2.50 per/sq in). If you want to design something simple FreePCB is super easy to learn http://www.freepcb.com/
YouTube has a lot of videos on how to solder if that interests you.
For FPGAs http://www.fpga4fun.com/ and http://www.knjn.com/
Other cool hardware related sites... http://www.curiousinventor.com/ http://www.gumstix.com/ http://www.cmucam.org/ http://www.electronics123.com/
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#14I could probably list off $15,000 of Electrical Engineering course text books, but for getting into "hardware type projects" they really won't get you very far. You'll learn far more (and far more quickly) by finding more hacker oriented resources that will bootstrap you with absolutely necessary information and skip the rest.
# Introductions #
To begin with, Sparkfun[1] has a bunch of tutorials, including a great introduction to embedded electronics.[2] This encompasses much of what you'll need for basic hardware projects.
As someone with a software background, the Arduino[2] is a great platform to start playing around with hardware. It acts as something of a bridge between software and hardware hacking by allowing you to program a micro-controller in a (relatively) high level language, and abstracting away a lot of the messy hardware details. This not only lets you start getting simple things done quickly, but also allows you to easily interface with virtually any other hardware modules you can come up with so you can push the boundaries of your knowledge. By making experimentation cheap, it strongly encourages the best types of exploratory learning.
# Projects #
Beyond the project tutorials listed on Sparkfun, OpenCircuits[3] is a great resource for more project ideas. Hack a Day[4] is often a good resource for inspiration, and the venerable Make[5] seems to always have something interesting.
# Sourcing Parts #
Sparkfun[1] is a terrific online electronic components store. It is extremely hacker friendly, having been founded to serve preciecesly that group. For some items the prices may be slightly higher than at Digikey[5], but this is more than made up by the fact that they have sorted through the bewildering number of seemingly-identical components available.
If you know exactly what you need, and especially if you can't find it through Sparkfun, Digikey is your friend. They have everything. And its uncle. The site is aimed at commercial designers who know what they're doing, so navigating the site isn't easy. If you're browsing without a specific component in mind, Digikey isn't the right place, but Octopart[7] might be. Its a search engine for electronic components that checks availability and compares prices of different retailers and also has some features to organize project shopping lists.
When buying electrical components, always buy plenty extra. You will burn things out. Five times in a row. Unit costs are cheap enough that its worth having lots of spares on hand.
As others have mentioned, this is a very broad topic. If you give us more details on what it is you're looking to learn, we'll probably be able to give more useful answers.
Good luck!
[1]: http://www.sparkfun.com - Well organized, hacker friendly
[2]: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/hdr.php?p=tutorials#BEE
[3]: http://www.opencircuits.com
[6]: http://digikey.com - Huge selection. Great if you know what you want.
[7]: http://octopart.com/ - Electronic Component search engine
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#15You may want to get started by jumping into the BasicStamp world. The advantage is that it is programmable, so it's be straightforward for you to make it "do stuff".
Get it with the development board and you can make LEDs blink, drive a LCD panel, etc. Grab a high-level book on robotics and bam! it'll quickly click how all this fits together.
It's high-level way to start, but a great way to dive into the hardware world without worrying too much about hardcore hardware stuff. (Which, as a fellow software hacker, is pretty boring! I want stuff I can code!)
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#16One of the best resources for getting a practical handle on electronics is the ARRL Handbook. They've released a version every year for many years now.
http://www.arrl.org/catalog/?item=no-hb2008
By the way, The Art Of Electronics has a pretty nice lab manual that goes with it....
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#17If you're serious about getting into this, consider obtaining a scope - even a cheap used one. Reading about various waveforms is one thing, but seeing the output of your circuit at various nodes can help build intuition.
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#18What specifically are you looking to learn though?
Do you want to learn about digital hardware - how chips and components are constructed using AND, OR and NOT gates? This will give you a pretty good idea of how hardware works, but the projects will be limited to you, a breadboard and some switches - not terribly exciting stuff.
On the other hand, if you want to learn build simple robots and such, you'll have something neat to do, but at the end you likely still won't have an idea of how a CPU works or GPS chip works.
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#19Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I've had an idea for an online game that would secretly teach you circuit design. In the game, you would build a series of water pipes to preform a certain tasks for each level. The amount of water in a pipe would be voltage, and how fast the water flows would be current. The game would start off very simply, and after "beating" a level, you would get more devices available to co…
That's a really neat idea.
I'm a programmer, and I wouldn't mind brainstorming with you if you wanted to try and put together a simple implementation. I'm just thinking that implementing components like resistors, diodes, and what-not sounds like a lot of fun.
Re: Ask YC: Learning circuit/hardware; lab book?
#20Digital and analog circuit design are art-like activities and doing them with grace requires knowledge of many other levels of abstraction all the way down to physics.
It is possible to lack these fundamentals and become a decent designer by doing design and filling in the gaps as you go but that is the exception and not the rule. And I have only ever seen this exception happen with the help of a real-life mentor and access to some fancy lab equipment.
It should be possible to formulate the teaching of EE into a more project-oriented manner but you need to realize this would be a nontraditional approach. When I studied for my EE degree we followed a program that has been roughly constant since the 1960s, starts close to the bottom and expands in both directions at the same time. They sprinkle design in the whole time but you do not get to do full designs until junior and senior year.
So finding this book might be tricky because EE is traditionally taught in a completely different way than you would like to approach it.
One thing worth looking into would be a class at a local college taught for either local motivated/gifted HS students or for physics majors which teaches you a bunch of practical EE stuff. The class would be lab oriented. Teach you the use of test equipment, building and debugging circuits, some theory. Objective is to get you into a place where you would have some hope of being able to come up with designs and make them work without having all that "foundation" knowledge. This would help you get to the point described above as you would have your mentor and access to the equipment (at least for the duration of the class-- make the most of it!)
If you are local to Boston the Harvard Extension School used to offer two such courses-- one for digital and one for analog. I believe the courses were designed by the author of "The Art of Electronics" and in fact used that text. (I did not take them but a friend of mine did.)
Neato, you can still take those classes; poke around http://www.extension.harvard.edu/ for:
* PHYS E-123a Laboratory Electronics: Analog Circuit Design * ENSC E-123 Laboratory Electronics: Digital Circuit Design
Happy hacking!