Learning Electronics

Communities Science, Engineering, & Security
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TL;DR - Does anyone have experience with this subscription? https://hackerboxes.com
If so, what can you tell me about it? Anything else you would recommend for learning Electronics or Computer Engineering? Thank you.

Hello L1T,

I am looking to break into the hardware side of Computer Science. I was exposed to electronics and computers at a young age (teenage), but I didn’t start pursuing it as a career and education until my early 20s. I have been Help Desk, Desktop Support, Systems Administrator, QA Engineer, Jr. Web Developer, and Jr. Security Analyst.

Earlier in my education I was majoring in Computer Engineering. The program was phenomenal, it was basically a hybrid of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I ended up transferring out into a softer Computer Science/Software Engineering program due to my job constraints. I have since received my degree. I am very happy with my decision, this post is not about regret, is it about continuing education.

Most of my career has been high level hardware, assembling PCs, racks, and servers. The last couple of years have had a more software focus. I am looking to learn more about the low level hardware part. I have accomplished a few things such as soldering an Ethernet port, repairing an AP that had a loose antenna, and the various Raspberry Pi/Arduino Projects.

My main problem with the above has been that I don’t learn the entire scope from YouTube/pdfs. They gloss over details that I am interested in or I feel might be very important. Books and Textbooks start with a very high technical level of detail and go even higher. I thought with the Raspberry Pi and other embedded projects I would learn a lot, but the documentation was poorly put together or just lacking all together.

I heard a lot of great things about HackerBox. Now, I’ve never had a “Loot Crate” type subscription before, so I’m a little wary on dumping a lot of cash into something like this. What does pique my interest is their starter set.

Does anyone have experience with HackerBox? Or, has anyone started from scratch and became a master of electronics? If so, what entry point did you start with?

Currently I have several screw driver sets, pry-tools, tweezers, the LEDs and Resistors that came with my Pi kit, and a soldering iron, but not much more than that. I am looking to learn about basic electronics, more than Physics taught me, all the way to Microprocessors and Embedded Systems. I realize that with consumer level resources I won’t be able to build a Ryzen system, but I am able to invest heavily into getting pretty damn close.

Thank you for your time. I hope this wasn’t too rambling.

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I have zero formal education about electronics. I was really curious about how electricity and radio worked, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I went to the library (before internet) and read everything they had, then re-read all of it several times. I bought a cheap soldering iron and some wire and started salvaging parts from electronics. After several years, I finally understood the basics from just sheer trial and error. There was so many little things not in those books. With this in mind, the first thing I would reccommend would be to talk to someone who really knows their stuff, in whatever field you are interested. It will shave lots of time off the learning curve.
Here is one website that has some neat things to build and play with.
http://www.techlib.com/electronics/index.html
Experiment and find someone at a university you can ask questions of. If you had a specific question about something this forum would probably answer it fast, lots of smart nerds here.

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Thank you for the response and the link!

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I’m also in the ‘interested in electronics but no formal learning and don’t know anyone else interested or could teach me’ category. While perhaps not the best resources, a couple that quickly come to mind are:

Adafruit - has tutorials for projects that can get pretty in-depth without being unnecessarily wordy or arcanely written. It can be a good place to look for project ideas, or to find projects using parts you want to learn to work with.

GreatScott! has tons of tutorial videos that tend to teach a lot of those things you would never figure out on your own by reading definitions of how individual components work. I watch his new videos every Sunday religiously, and you can start to pick up on systems and how using more than one or two things together can cause certain conditions.

I particularly like when he tries to remake cheap electronic boards by building them himself (DIY or Buy series) and includes his failures. He also has an Electronic Basics series. His videos are edited for brevity, so you may have to rewatch some parts if you miss something the first time.

I haven’t seen hackerboxes, but things similar to it. I’m ultra cheap and would rather buy parts for something I want to do. Many projects involve building things I would never use. That’s one of my main hurdles in Linux, all of the home servers and VM’s and things people use to learn are things I would never use, and I can’t bring myself to dump that many hours into a project I’m not interested in. If you aren’t as cheap as I am and willing to build whatever they send you as a learning experience then It may be worthwhile.

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Something like this is what I was looking for, thank you for posting this.

I think I agree with both of your posts. I’m going to have to grind out hours, much like I had to with CompSci, development, I.T. related things, etc. If that requires reading something I don’t understand a few times until it clicks, so be it.

I will also take advantage of online resources provided and might checkout the HackerBox starter kit. If it comes with great documentation and I find some success, I might consider subscribing or going deeper into online projects.

I appreciate the insight, responses, and resources on this.

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You got the main tools already: pliers, tweezers, soldering iron
A bench psu and multimeter are always handy to have.
On the software side, you might want to take a look at http://fritzing.org/home/ . Fritzing is an easy to use toolbox to plan the hardware surrounding your DIY projects and microcontroller boards.

How to get started:
Take broken stuff apart, take working stuff apart, build things from broken and working things. Just do it!
Set yourself a goal, start planning out the project, look and ask for help when you don´t know any further. However it is important to not give up. Sometimes you run out of the right resistor and have to improvise (been there, done that), or you are 4mm short of the brass rod. The time it takes for the package with stuff to arrive is time you can spend learning more.

Some communities worth checking out:
https://forum.arduino.cc
https://www.element14.com/community/welcome

Youtube channels that go into greater depth on electronics:


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Great Scott! also has some good electronic tutorials

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Seconded on watching bigclive. Hes definitely taught me a thing or two. Also suggest AvE, he’s not all electronics but the electronics he does have is broken down for the novices watching so you understand more “why” as well as “how”. Great Scott is pretty good too but I would say hes a little more advanced personally. Ben heck is full on hard mode most of the time.

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Electrical and Computer Engineering sophomore here, soldering is fun, easy, and surprisingly forgiving. Finding good tutorials on youtube is strangely hard; EEVblog has a fantastic series. The guy is a great resource, but his gear recommendations always run a few hundred dollars out of my price range as a hobbyist. You’ll want to get a multimeter—I got a $30 POS from Radioshack (R.I.P.) and it does suck to use but it’s enough.

I cut my teeth trying to fix broken game controllers and guitar pedals, with mixed results. But my results are less mixed now! That means I’m learning, I think. Recently, I’ve been building an ErgoDox. Awesome DIY project, had to solder together some circuit boards. Soldering only becomes challenging when dealing with very small surface-mount components (small like you need a binocular microscope small). DIY projects never use these sizes though, since DIY-ers don’t have microscopes.

The hackerbox looks cool, and I’m sure it won’t hurt your skills, but it’s a little expensive for my tastes. I’d prefer to pick my own projects and source the parts myself. Then again, sometimes you need a kick in the pants to start a project…

I learned how passive circuit elements (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) work in a lecture at uni. Whenever my notes fall short, my go-to resource is hyperphysics.com. But that’s mostly because they usually have the formula I missed, not because their explanations are great as a lecture substitute. Maybe you could buy a textbook? E&M physics classes often cover passives, but not their applications (filters, signals, etc.).

If you want to learn the bedrock of embedded systems, look into introductory digital circuits. Silicon makes logic gates, logic gates make combinatorial logic or memory. Get an FPGA board and you can play with Verilog—it’s not a programming language, it’s a “hardware description language”. You can have code execute concurrently and stuff. Hardware’s funny.

It’s tough, though. Most people who know hardware well enough for it to be their job went to school for hardware. I’m not sure if there’s an easy, mainstream way to get involved besides academia.

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I sincerely appreciate the suggestions. I have bookmarked them and have, what looks to be, years of material to get me going to where I need to be.

Hopefully this can keep going and turn into some sort of Knowledge Base lol.

Thank you all!

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Keep us posted when the first light start flashing or the first voltage regulator catches fire!

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Or the first time you pee a little because the cap was backwards

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Radio Shack had a book called Basic Electronics that really helped me understand how semi-conductors and doping worked and could turn them into a switch. Also resistors and capacitors too.
For me I just seem to be able to learn and retain and understand better when I am in a quite place with a paper book.

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Sup, I hope to be posting stuff soon here of my experience of diving into embedded stuff.