These starter kits are great. I'm a complete electronics newbie but was always interested, but found the sheer choice of equipment on offer, and the fear of buying a bunch of kit that wasn't compatible to be a barrier to getting started.
I came across a kit for the Micro:bit which I purchased as a Christmas gift for my young daughter. It's really captured that delight in working with technology for me again. Even starting with the LED "Hello World" examples, as described in the post here, led (haha, whata pun) me down a rabbit hole when I noticed blue lights were flickering, while red ones were fine. I thought it was a defective LED, but it turns out power requirements vary depending on wavelength of light being generated.
I never would have considered that in a million years, but then of course you get deeper into the physics of all this, and it's just fascinating. All thanks to a kids electronics starter kit.
I've purchased a few other bits and bobs now, and discovered simulators so you can build out your breadboard circuits without fear of frying components (luckily the kits include a few LEDs as I learnt the hard way!) I'm now onto trying to build out a magic wand for my daughter to control the house smart lights with gestures as she's just got into Harry Potter. I love how there's a whole hobby community around this stuff too, and the basic websites with datasheets and descriptions of the various gizmos and archaic "warnings". It reminds me of learning 3d graphics development back in the day, when openGL was the goto, and building things up from the math concepts without layer upon layer of abstractions and opinions getting in the way.
Is getting a kit like this the recommended way to learn electronics? I don't know anything about it! I would like to get to the point where I can light up a LED bulb programmatically and understand how it's happening.
There is no one way to learn electronics. The Arduino will hold your hand through lighting up an LED, but depending on how much depth you want, may not teach you how it's happening. Working with an Arduino is like bowling with bumpers, which is a good place to start.
My biggest problem is that you get excited for the first few days, then you realize that there is very little you can learn from these toy projects, and then there isn't a project that is meaningful (to yourself) enough to persue. If you look at all those motors and sensors -- you need to think hard enough to come up with a project that makes good use of them.
I browsed maybe 50 of the most viewed project on arduino website to get inspired. There are may be 1 or 2 that somewhat interest me.
Based on impression coming from secondhand marketplace listings, my very uninformed guess is that 70% of Arduino kits and raspberry pi units purchased by amateurs are sitting in their home gathering dust, including mine.
Some sort of class helps here a lot - not as much as actual tutoring, but just as motivation and audience that you can show off your projects to.
A tea-making robot you made at your home is boring. A tea-making robot you made during class which participated in end-of-class competition and got 3rd place? Much more interesting.
And if you are in CA, there is Robogames which has (or at least had in the past) categories such as "art bot" (any Arduino project which has a moving part can participate) and even "static bot" (for projects without moving parts). You get to demo your project to few hundred participants, and maybe even get a prize!
I have three within my range of vision if I lean a bit and look into another room, and only one gets used. And that's because I compile audio plugins to release VST2 on the Pi as a platform (compiling on a Pi 400) relying on Reaper as a host DAW.
I'm not doing audio work on the Pi, though, just supporting the platform for those (?) who do (?).
I would love to come up with cool things to do with Arduinos etc: I hacked high sample rate support into Eurorack modules that ran on Teensy, and then the Teensy that had the raw audio output pin which supported this use, hit end of life so those modules cannot be replaced now, and what I have is all I'll ever have.
The world of tiny computers is lovely but doesn't always stay accessible. For instance, I never got into hardware synth making that much, but these days all the oscillator chips etc. you'd want to hack with require robotic installation: they're too tiny for someone who grew up on DIP.
I can't comment on how good these things are for learning electronics but I find a lot of people who learn embedded development or programming from Arduino end up learning an endless number of bad practices.
I think C++ is a terrible programming language to give to people with potentially no prior programming or at last no prior C++ experience. And for people who _do_ know C++, it's just a weird environment full of strange hacks (may as well just go straight for bare metal).
Teaching academically-correct C++ is not one of Arduino's goals. C++ just happens to be one of the tools in the box.
EE's complain that Arduino doesn't teach correct electronic circuit design principles. Which is also not one of its goals.
The point of Arduino is to learn how--with nothing but a cheap microcontroller and some wires--to make lights blink, sensors sense, and servos serve. It's a starting point for easy and cheap experimentation, not a well-structured curriculum.
When I did my electronics technical diploma at CEGEP, we lost point if our wires were not perfect, they had to be of exact length, use only right angle, bus had to be color coded... I used to find that petty, my boards where on the messy side (but compared to the one from the article they were neat) but when I saw those horror that have more in common with an eurorack patch I understood what the teachers were trying to instill in us.
Wires placement are like properly formatted code, it helps with readability and even with debugability. Sorry for the rant, i an back to yelling at the clouds!
I think it's actually a fantastic intro to electronics. There's nothing you can really do with "just arduino programming", the whole point is it lets you interface with the real world and therefor encounter electronics problems by default
The article even touches on that in the first hello world
> This simple exercise it by itself incredibly interesting that opened a series of questions:
> Q: Why is a resistor needed? A: High current and increased temperature damage its delicate heterojunction structures, which eventually cause it to burnout
> Q: What happens if the polarity is inverted? A: Similar to a normal diode, current will not flow and the LED will not light up. As long as this reverse power is not high, the LED will not burn and can still be used with correct polarity afterwards
> Q: How to interpret its data sheet? A: There are several interesting aspects its datasheet, like the LED’s wavelength curve, operating current and voltage, etc
I had a look at the document of the kit, and it's like the one I have: it doesn't even explain what is a current and a tension, or what is the relation between resistance, tension and current, althought it is the basic of the basic of electronics
The fact that the author uses the word heterojunction that is at the same time not useful at the first level for a beginner and not used or explained in the document shows that he was either already knowledgeable or spent a lot of time with other ressources to learn.
I'm not saying that these kits are bad, or that nowaday you cannot do many great thing with just an arduino and plug and play components, but they don't teach electronics.
The official arduino starter kit teaches some beginner level information, but it is very rudimentary. It is really hard to penetrate the next level of electronics—electronic engineers will stress the importance of precise calculations where previously I was just used to putting together whatever components I had from a kit, with few caveats.
It was not until I tried buying extra transistors that I realized I didn’t understand anything—-and this was after taking the Georgia Tech introduction to electronics free online course. Suddenly there were data sheets and graphs, and not to mention prices. The Build Your PCB course I found myself similarly in over my head, as it felt geared towards EE’s. But I learned about KiCAD. Maybe I will give Ben Eater another try
I see it more like the goal is to build cool stuff, learning electronics is the happy unintentional side effect as you're exposed to concepts relevant to what you want to do.
e.g. I want to build a cool robot with my kid -> oh why can't you just wire the motors directly to arduino output pins -> oh motors need a lot of current to run ...
(btw have never heard voltage be called tension, TIL)
I came across a kit for the Micro:bit which I purchased as a Christmas gift for my young daughter. It's really captured that delight in working with technology for me again. Even starting with the LED "Hello World" examples, as described in the post here, led (haha, whata pun) me down a rabbit hole when I noticed blue lights were flickering, while red ones were fine. I thought it was a defective LED, but it turns out power requirements vary depending on wavelength of light being generated.
I never would have considered that in a million years, but then of course you get deeper into the physics of all this, and it's just fascinating. All thanks to a kids electronics starter kit.
I've purchased a few other bits and bobs now, and discovered simulators so you can build out your breadboard circuits without fear of frying components (luckily the kits include a few LEDs as I learnt the hard way!) I'm now onto trying to build out a magic wand for my daughter to control the house smart lights with gestures as she's just got into Harry Potter. I love how there's a whole hobby community around this stuff too, and the basic websites with datasheets and descriptions of the various gizmos and archaic "warnings". It reminds me of learning 3d graphics development back in the day, when openGL was the goto, and building things up from the math concepts without layer upon layer of abstractions and opinions getting in the way.
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