but, let's say that is learning electronic wasted time... ok... we will stop learn electronics becouse we have arduino and others staf... and that is ok... but... after 10, 20 years till now we will use the same arduino and others stuf... why??? becouse we are stop learning electronics and we using arduino and nobody will not design beter arduino beter staf, becouse we will not know to design new staf... we will not know anything but hooking arduino from past... we will stuck in the past....
I'm not into electronics but it certainly can be a good thing to know. Long story short: My brother-in-law years ago got a CD ROM drive for Christmas (back when it was the new tech) and hooked it up to his stereo system and then freaked out when the output was only in mono. He was crushed (he and his dad are audiophiles). Turns out a stereo model was another $150 or so. His dad, who does know electronics, took a look at the audio interface and realized that all that was needed was to de-solder two wires and swap them, and then re-solder. Instant stereo. The difference between a mono and stereo CD drive was a buck fifty and two swapped wires. Talk about a scam.
A mono CD player doesn't even make much sense. A CD is inherently stereo and the complex, expensive part of any cd player reads both channels whether it wants to or not
Seems like more people need some electronics-fundamentals than you thought!? Isn't that reason enough to make more fundamental-videos again, Dave? I would watch them... and need them:)
billyrubin666 yeah i learned all of from dave about opamps before that i didn't knew nothing about them, also it's silly because i have used them in circuits, and i'm almost graduated university.
It's just so much fun to do. There's something magical about sitting over your own etched circuit board, soldering on the parts and then seeing it spring to life. Just awesome! :)
I disagree; tinkering with arduinos and raspberry will eventually push you into learning electronics. May not be fully fledged, that's true; but nonetheless, you'll be figuring out the fundamentals soon enough.
@@jaguarke069 yes when you start exploring those fundamentals that is when you start to become more of an electronics guy. Just using the arduino and Pis by themselves and putting shields together and making it all work is not electronics
@@jackevans2386 I have noticed this as well alot of Arduino programming is just importing and using a ton of external functions made by someone else and then writing a bit of your own code to tie it all together.
Yup. The same kind of question would be: I am confused what is the point in learning how to play guitar, when you can switch on the radio, MP3 or whatever, and listen to it?
dismayer666 Well, he still wants to tinker with stuff right ? I think he takes tools like the Arduinos and such for learning platforms and projects basic building blocks. He doesn't seem look further down the optimisation road since "everything" can be done with these now.
TheSliderW I'd suggest : "What's the point in learning how to swim when you can wear a life jacket ?" Or "What's the point in learning how to read when you can listen to an audiobook ?" It basically boils down to having someone do the hard work for you. You're either active or passive.
TheSliderW Sure, I don't condemn the guy :) Well, I agree, but if he wants to i.e. add some more LEDs, he needs to use a transisor, and that's where the story starts :) And sooner or later such a man would learn some basics. Of course if he's serious about all this stuff. As Dave said, we enjoy the process of building/making electronics, and that's fun for me. Cheers!
I think the point is that _someone_ has got to make the arduinos, teensies, and even the iphones or android phones of tomorrow. Do you want to build stuff yourself? Then you have to learn your basic electronics. If you just want to put together something that _someone else_ built, then maybe you don't need. But you'll have to pay someone else to fix the thing if for any reason it stops working. Or throw it away and buy another one.
allluckyseven Good argument, but just to play with the argument: Lets exchange "build stuff" with "grow food". Sounds silly at first, because most of us are living pretty good on the agricultural food surplus, but the world isn´t getting bigger in the same rate as humans reproduce. Someone has to feed the guy that makes the next iPhone.
You can't really learn it all. I've saved a hell of a lot of money by working on my own vehicles, but I don't have the time or mental capacity to also learn how to be my own doctor, my own lawyer, my own plumber, etc. You can't master everything. You're going to end up having to pay someone for something.
As a 2-3 year old newbie in this realm and having started on arduino, it becomes restrictive REALLY quickly. Like you said, what if you want to do something you can't just get a module to do for you? Learning the basics opened up sooo many more avenues for me. Totally agree with you Dave!
mechanical engineer reporting ... basic electronics is an important part of every single day at work for me. far more important than fluids or even dynamics. basic analog circuits is one of the most important things i ever learned.
Great video. I asked myself the question 6 years ago and never looked back. Electronics is a way of life. I am completing my BA Language degree this year, but I still do electronics every day. If you ever designed your own electronics and it worked, good! Now you need to improve it. This is the reason for learning electronics. My grandfather did communications for 40years and to this day I still learn myself and him things we did not know. As he said "building a kit is being a kit builder, designing the kit is being a maker".
My grandfather is 68 years and still he feels that me using a Pi or Arduino is building a prototype. He says its time to make your own board now (just as Dave said). If it is a one off, sure!! Use what ever you feel like, but if you start thinking bigger, time to look at the world use. Most people will not use it the way you do, so plan ahead for to fail. To do this you need to learn electronics. This counts for software and hardware makers. Remember, being the next big thing requires you to know the market you are in. If you work the market differently , you are making.....if you simply reproduce, you are copying. Time to think about what you want to do with this project......?
Gary Blenkinsopp I'm not sure I can sleep tonight. I have a recurring nightmare where David 2 is sneaking into my workshop and moving all my tools around...
Had that exact same question a few months ago from a friend. I wanted to find an example that was so basic, it really was ridicules but still made sense. Ended up explaining this: "It's just simply a nice thing to know, for example to find out if or when you need a basic 10k pull-up resistor in your project and what effect it has" - I think having that feeling that you don't need to learn basic electronics would fit Dave's saying "It's a trap for young players" very well! I hope everyone who dabbles with micro controllers sees the potential in knowing what and how the things around their micro controller work. And that basically applies to any field if it's programming, cooking, animating, photography or gardening or what ever :) It's nice to know the basics to get a good solid understanding on whats going on behind the scene. Thumbs up for a great video Dave! (Good on ya Dave!)
I'm a mechanical engineer and found learning electronics so useful, especially that I developed hobby interests in making different integrated projects, requiring all mechanical, electronic and software skills. I designed and made a few boards that are actually working, and there was some debugging to do. Learning is fun, and it helps making things more functional, more valuable, and at the end more innovative. What's the fun when you're not learning even the basics things :) Great video!
Agree with Dave. A few years ago I played around with Netduinos. Those small modules have limited current outputs, if you hook up an led, you will burn it in no time. The forums were full with complaints, people broke them all the time.The solution was easy, hooking up a transistor, but many guys did not understand it. Basics.
Dave could have answered the question in 15 seconds but he is an awesome lecturer so by the end of the video the answer is ringing in my head. Thanks Dave.
I think the off the shelf, or straight from ebay, parts are where a lot of young hobbyists get started. Instant results with development boards is a big draw, it is certainly where I started. I struggle with mathematics, so it wasn't the easiest point to start from, but it was a natural progression for me to start playing on the breadboard, designing my own circuits and making my own custom boards. I hope that this is the case for most people. I still do use off the shelf parts, development boards and 'modules', but I couple it with my own hard won electronics experience and the desire to progress that development into a custom circuit. I have learned more from failing that succeeding, so my journey pretty much reflects what Dave is saying.
Hi my name is Mustafa I’ve studied electronics over 35 years ago I’ve recently taken it up again and I’m loving it I enjoy watching your program keep up the great work 😊
Love the Chanel Dave I am 47 and retired due to ill health and I am loving spending the time learning the basics electronics I've learned how to build my own power supplies and enjoying every minute of it so I agree with you wholeheartedly
What you say is so true - The first thing that got me started was making a crystal set with a potato as the cats whisker and then a lump of coal for the crystal and both took a lot of jiggling to receive the bbc home service - all wire for coils and antenna salvaged from a busted valve radio a neighbour chucked out - I was 7, and now 65 this year - just the other day a neighbour chucked out a microwave oven I wanted the Transformer to make a welder but was surprised to find a switchmode PSU and the mains filter PCB with 10 amp fuses, so change of use gonna make a temperature controlled hot plate from the elements for surface mount pcbs oven. and no arduino involved - 2 nice big magnets from the duff magnetron. If I did not know about electronic circuits and components it would have ended up scraped so a big thumbs up for this video.
This has been a valuable bit of encouragement because I literally JUST got back into tinkering with electronics and tried building a working astable multivibrator circuit with the 555 timer and failed horribly. This has reminded me that it's not just the "end", but the "means" through which we solve everyday electronic problems. Thanks for all the helpful videos.
Obviously a hobbyist can learn as little or as much as he likes. It's up to him. But if he ever wants to go for a job in electronics he'll need to understand the stuff or he won't last long. I wish him well and hope he enjoys his hobby, at whatever level he chooses.
There are about dozen different ways to answer this question. I'm afraid Dave's version might alienate some software/maker/beginner folks. ("You kids are just USING electronics! That's LAME! Now....get off my lawn!") EE's *do* use building blocks in the their design. All the time - almost any design of any reasonably complexity will have a recycled section of it's design. But you need to understand electronics to know the limits of those building block. Adafruit, sparkfun, and the like are glad to sell you a chip and a board on it. But unlike software - circuits have real limits that can bite you in the butt. And that's just the start. If you stay inside a digital world of break out boards, Pi hats, and arduino sheilds, you'll be more-or-less safe. If you want to do that - have at it! No problem! Venture out of that - and you're in real trouble. When you want to interface with the outside world, then you can forget about the safe cocoon of 5 volt logic, SPI and the tutorials. Want to transmit a signal 100 feet? Well, you're going to have a bad time at burning man. voltage drops and reflections are going to become something you'll wish you knew about. Why should you learn electronics? Cause it's freaking awesome. Also, it's endless. You'll never learn it all. Even Dave will admit that he knows a fraction of what there is to learn. So if you love learning, electronics will never be "boring" that's for sure.
Not certain about the points made but ,if anyone else wants to discover introduction to electronics book try Sovallo Circuits Expert Fixer ( search on google ) ? Ive heard some amazing things about it and my mate got great success with it.
When I wanted to get involved in electronics a year ago I was lucky enough to find your blog. Watched your video on starting an electronics lab, went out and purchased what I needed and hit the ground running. My youngest brother Larry Morgan Jr is lead Hardware Engineer at National Instruments so he steers me in the right direction. I am an analog guy. Not into micro controllers although they are us-full. I have to understand how things work on the most fundamental level because I know without that knowledge, your just faking it. . At my age (54) I know all to well that without a well rounded education and understanding of the basics, your LOST!! THANK YOU DAVE!
good explanation and easy to understand for beginners and lay people, I like and inspiration for my channel mantek sarai we need to know electronics because every day we live around it and use it almost all the time, we cannot live without it
My Grandmother taught science in high school in the 1930-1940 time period. When she died I got her science book "The Science of Everyday Life". There was a lot of basic electronics in it. The people of the day though that everyone needed to know basic electronics just like basic biology or basic agriculture. It inspired me to love electronics.
In addition to the "why did that blow up?" reason, the modules are like lego-blocks. So much fun to build you're first machine, but you'll soon bump into the limits of your blocks. Building your own 'blocks' expands you're possibilities exponentially.
I find an attitude of why learn basic anything, we consume without any understanding of how things work, look at the amount of people that drive & have no clue on how their car works beyond gas goes in here & key goes there, they break down at the roadside & often wait hours for what potentially could be a simple fix using basic skills. I don't understand it, in fact find it quite ignorant, the attitude of oh I'll phone someone to repair it or just throwing something away & buying new over s simple repair, my fave being a cap going on the psu circuit of electronics, simple fix saves a lot of money with minimal effort.
madman1027 True that. I hate when people say that they "don't know" how to repair something like mobile phone screen, table fan or headlight bulb without even *trying*. It's not like engineer minded people know 99% of the devices on earth by heart. They'd need to just open the damn thing and see where it leads them! If it seems baffling, then just get the info from Google. Some people act like repairmen have some mystical powers granted only for the chosen ones. No, they just investigate and use Google.
madman1027 I agree with you in principle but disagree to the degree you speak about it. If you wanted to get into learning the fundamentals of *everything* just so you can avoid having to rely on someone else to fix what is considered trivial tasks in various fields, that would take a good chunk of time out of your life and for many never pay off. Someone with no interest in how cars work is not going to spend the time learning the basics of how to fix and maintain basic aspects of cars for the few moments in their life they need to wait for a tow. It's just not that frequent unless you have REALLY bad luck with cars. At the very least I do think people should be able to do things like check their fluids. It's designed to be user friendly... I think sometimes hobbyists and professionals forget how much work actually went into the initial learning process for what they do. Expecting everyone do to do that for everything so we don't need to rely on others for what is considered easy fixes is a bit silly. That said, being able to replace caps is a godsend though that would save people a lot of money. I've lost count of the amount of things I've saved over such a trivial fix. I honestly wouldn't expect Joe Shmoe to be able to do it, nor would I advise him to poke around in high voltage electronics though, really. I had a friend a long while back who decided he was going to fix the caps in his LCD monitor that went bad, and ended up electrocuting himself because of the high current still residing in the device some time after turning it off. He was lucky to survive -- he almost didn't. I'm actually surprised I didn't kill myself as a kid, either. I used to dive into all manners of electronics, some exceedingly high current.
Completely fair point! I probably didn't word mine well enough. It's the lack of effort that frustrates me a little, these days there's a wealth of information about on the internet that's easily accessible, I wouldn't expect everyone to dive in but rather than throwing something away they could learn it's a simple fix & have it repaired or possibly repair it themselves. I believe it also helps people educate themselves a little & reduces their opportunity to be ripped of by dodgy repairmen/mechanics etc. I guess what I'm trying to say is that having the initiative to either take a look, a little basic research online or have a go (depending what it is) from time to time would make a huge difference to the way people just consume all the time. It would be unrealistic to expect everyone to learn a little about everything but exploring a little would return some of the practical hands on experience people are lacking. I feel I could go on regarding both extremes, we have a generation of people that consume & dispose yet we have a huge maker/engineering movement too, I don't know if it's because it interests me that I'm so aware of it or it is as well known. Thanks for the response though, I've quite a bit to take away from this!!
Its all about time. I dont think a doctor is worth taking time to fix his car... so generally speaking, if you have a job at a certain rate per hour and you compare it to how many hours your are going to waste fixing your car, and then compare it for a professional per hour and pay... you see the point. You really cant be your own doctor, all the time for everything.
The term "appliance operator" has been used to describe many newer ham radio operators who are only interested in assembling store bought gear and making contacts with it. Electronics hobbyists are interested in learning new skills and applying their knowledge to solve problems. Whole different thing. I've been learning electronics for over 50 years, and I still love it.
Dave you are spot on with this blab. You have to understand the basics to use the other products to their full extant. All of the things we learned in school, math, physics and electronic are the building blocks for what we learn in the real world. I had a professor at university ask all of the graduating seniors to stand one day near the end of term. He asked that they do one thing when they went out to work in the real world. He said " Please, when you start working keep your mouth shut and learn what the people who are working in your field have to teach you before you open your mouth. What you learn here at this university is just the beginning of your education, the basic building blocks of electrical engineering"
You're right. Today I wired up my first selfmade PCB. It is for a safe. Without the skills that I have learned, the troubleshooting to get this working would have been last for days. Shorts between VCC and GND, Layout issues (Not connected GND plane), wrong soldered LEDs, diode for the coil and all sorts of things. I'm happy to learn about that, and I've learned many things on your RU-vid channel. Thank you :-)
Definitely agreed. No one said one has to learn it in just a year - I started very young with a breadboard kit with some components and a manual, and I am still learning a lot today, bit by bit at work.
Totally agree. I was watching some videos on some software I wanted to start using with a future project, and came across a video where someone was using lego-mindstorms plus a software platform that *somebody else developed* for their final project to graduate college... It's sad, because all they had to do was prove they can configure off the shelf software and interface it with off the shelf hardware - really prove's Dave's point that hobbyist skills are often more important than degrees.
nothing better than a fully-discrete components shortwave receiver or an analog color tv to start a solid journey in electronics. digital electronics is so powerful but hiding a huge layer of analog curiosities.
Dave, any chance of you doing an introduction to electronics series of videos on eevbolg? You'd make a great teacher, and it would be good to have a resource where electronics is taught from a more practical angle rather than academic.
I have started to learn my basics electronics with the book Make: Electronics. Now I want to go further and will read Horowitz' book 'the Art of Electronics'. And at the end of the day I want to build my own Segway :D
An analogy is the difference between reading a book and listening to books on tape. Reading gives you a much deeper understanding and improves your own writing.
We have a term at work for what you're talking about, Dave: "Board Swapper". The kind of "tech" who asks why you just tracked down and replaced a cracked SMD resistor on a $12 board in the space of 5 minutes. This particular guy was swapping boards on our already-triaged-and-labeled production fallout, destroying the interboard connectors as he went and telling us stuff we already knew. "This-is-SIM-board." became his nickname among our group; behind his back, of course.
Excellent comment on the importance of learning electronics 101, 102, 103 etc. As an electrical engineer I see too many recent graduates with limited practical experience and limited basic electronics and sometimes electrical circuits!
Years a go I made an autoranging voltmeter from a Timex Sinclair computer and a tv, with extra hardware I added to make it all work. Programmed in z80 machine language. By the time I made it work radio shack was selling one for $30. Waste of time? Hardly. This and several projects like it resulted in a 30 year electronics career that was very rewarding. I have no degree, but a good grounding in the basics gave me a good life.
Embedded systems programming is a legitimate step up in the layer of hardware abstraction. When you tackle problems that come up at higher abstractions, the amount of lower-level details become overwhelming. The pattern of thought is to consider hardware -- and the complexity of analog design -- as a functional block (i.e., not in terms of their physical properties but in terms of abstract qualities like the service it provides "what it does", its "input requirements", its "performance", and its "operational requirements"). For example, you can think of a summer op-amp circuit in terms of its electrical interconnections, part counts, and their individual specs or you can think of it as a "device which gives you the sum of signals". Thinking about circuits in terms of functional blocks allows people to compose those blocks to create more complex systems which can 'do more'. The trade off is that you make assumptions about the performance of the hardware that implements the functionality of each of those blocks. This is where basic electronics becomes important. You need to be able to design/improve the building block so that it delivers the service and functionality promised (or as people say "the functional block performs 'to spec'"). The ability to solve problems at high-level of abstractions allow you to create electronic devices with more sophisticated behavior. Knowledge about electronics and analog/mixed signals help you troubleshoot and design better building blocks that go into those devices. Knowing how to program Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and MCUs help you solve a different class of problems than knowing electronics. It's apples-and-oranges to say one is more important than the other.
Basic electronics allows you to to optimize the circuits, you could use a $30 arduino to flash a led, or use two transistors, two resistors and two capacitors for $1. It also allows to overcome software limitations.
This. I'm a web developer. Bought an Arduino earlier this year. Toyed a bit with a breadboard and the basic examples but didn't feel like I was learning anything at all. Let alone I was "doing" something cool with it. Over the space of a few months: got myself a soldering iron and a boatload of components, started tinkering and reading such books as "Getting started with Electronics" by Forrest Mims. :-) I'm a novice, but I'm learning each day! Love it.
I have almost nil electronics and agree with everything you said. The basics are very important and that comes across time and time again as I watch and try to learn from the very experienced like yourself.
When I was a kid, we had a store in town called Radio Inc. where there was always a pot of coffee on, and it was a hang out for both hobbyists and professional electronics techs. If you needed help with anything electronic, that was the place to go. They had all the discrete components boards etching supplies, cases, tools test equipment and the whole nine yards under one roof. They also had a large meeting room and they would have sessions where people from Heathkit, Texas Instruments, Ramsey, HP, Ohio Scientific and numerous other companies would come in for a dog and pony show and the public was usually invited. That was a great way to learn about a new scope, new kits, etc. There is nothing like that around anymore. They also had a reference library with all the Sams ever published, and reference sheets on all the solid state and tube components. I learned so much from dropping by and hanging out. I had 3 years of vocational electronics in high school, and I also got a couple jobs through contacts I made there. But like you said, hobbyists don't have the basic skills anymore. It is a shame, because there is a need today for one-off solutions that few know how to build. There are several groups that have started teaching those basic skills to kids. Teaching basic programming skills with the Raspberry Pi or Arduino, and interfacing to custom electronics through the gpio. But even there, the numbers are too small, and it will take several years before any real impact is realized. BTW, good video.
Brilliant, Thank you, this video is great for my sons, in a age where life is so easy (compared to the 70's & 80's) and quickly you can get what you want, be it food, amazon or online shopping, grocery shopping delivery to your door, learning woodwork, electrical/electronics, steel work, building, diagnostic skills, a tool kit, what tools to have when your on the tools, programming/coding, etc. My sons are taught the lot, enjoy sports, but the kids these days notice, the only electronics they need to know is how to turn on the t.v and PlayStation or xbox,
I am a beginner electronics hobbyist who is reading through a basic circuits textbook to learn the theory right now so I understand what resistors/caps/inductors do and what type of issues arise and the basic ohm's law, KCL/KVL, etc. IMO, its important because it provides insight into debugging. If we know what potential causes of issues can be, we become better debuggers.
Very well said I can still remember the first day. I was trying to get a red LED running on a 12 V car battery basically for a interior switch. Ever since then I've been hooked on electronics you can't beat rummaging around components and finding out what they do.
Couldn't agree more Dave. I love using Arduinos and little modules, but I get much more satisfaction from building up a circuit than I do from running code. I've got a real soft spot for digital logic using 4000 and 7400 chips, and I've learned a lot about power supply design and decoupling just from having my breadboarded circuits misbehave.
that was great dave and true to the point. in the days of electronic australia a lot of great projects some i build and some i did'nt you are right fix ones that did'nt work, the best joe
I consider myself embedded system engineer/programmer and I don't think that it is necessary to learn any more than basic electronics; ohms law, using oscilloscope, logic analyser, ohm/volt/ammeter, reading schematics, understanding datasheets, soldering, basic PCB design. But when something doesn't work, for troubleshooting some more electronics knowledge will of course help. So if you ask me electronics is just a tool like any other, it is best to learn it as you go, best time for learning is when magic smoke escapes from your gear.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you used the word 'FUN', for instance the first sounds coming from that two transistor radio you just built, tremendous satisfaction!! Or if it does not work, even greater pleasure when you finally beat the bugs out of it. From then on......you're hooked!!!!
krawutzimon They don't claim to do anything else either. Your comment is pretty snobbish. The job postings usually has that title. And it is pretty specialized, writing C for a PIC is rather different than doing web development, you really need to know the CPU at a basic level.
krawutzimon embedded systems programmer is not only about arduino like stuff, e.s.p. is basically programmer for microcontrollers, SoC or FPGA and also some electronic designer(if there is cross-field issue). So your "Unfortunately" is invalid here, embedded system programmer is not the same as writing easy code for development board at all.
RussianCthulhu An e.s.p. wrote the functions, drivers, and libraries that make writing code for arduino & other development kits easy. Those who turn their nose up at an e.s.p. do not have experience with, for example, writing a driver from scratch for an IC.
I do C# programming, and bought a netduino to play about with. I quickly realised it was good for improving my coding, but I didn't have a clue how the electronics actually worked. I liked your video Dave, but it would have been great if you could have taken it slightly further and suggested some good learning resources (perhaps online) or starting points for those wishing to learn (like me).
I have never had a project that did not require some electronics. The Arduino, PI, PIC and such can save a lot of parts but rarely all parts. I recently did a plug strip where there is a series of time delays between each socket going live. The code was simple as saved me 5 timer chips but I still needed an Triac and something to control it, and something to drive it, so needed for each one a transistor, one triac controller, and a triac for each circuit to be controlled. Without some basic electronics I would have been totally stuck, with the basics I was able to pick a suitable transistor, get the right Triac and get the right Triac controller, was able to read the spec sheets on these parts, pick the right resistors and such. Many projects require you to do some basic electronics and frankly for me that is the most fun part of any project, doing the electronic, drawing the schematic, laying out the PCB. It does not take a lot of time to master the basics thanks to endless tutorials on-line you can get this pretty quick and then be self sufficient on your projects.
I started learn electronics for hobby, because i have searched about years for a circuit that can drive an pt100 temperature res with a quality of +- 0.1°C. It's actually not to hard to achieve this. But without knowledge about the basics of electronics it seems like a unachievable thing. On the forums they say use DS18B20, but i had the problem that the case of an DS18B20 is not suitable for my application, so i started. And it was great. Even the simplest problem to calculate the resistor a BJT in saturation so that i can use it with a specific microcontroller voltage, before i had some basic knowledge about transistor i looked at datasheets and searched for the resistor values at the right voltage. But within 2 days reading the book the art of electronics i could calculate this resistor easily. I don't thing you need the exactly knowing about every parameter when you are doing hobby electronics, but it's so fun to learn something new.
a good answer to this one is the question "what if you don't have enough pins?". or "what if you wanted to make your own keyboard?" or "what will you do if you wanna communicate with something 2 miles away in the middle of nowhere?". generally speaking chips allow a lot but are also prohibitive for a wide range of applications. figuring out which resistor to put before an LED or how to dim an LED alone are already things you can't really do without some understanding of electronics.
This is valid on so many areas today because the kids today have just stopped learning the fundamentals today. It's not just electronics. Look at computers and programming. When I started you either had basic or assembler (pretty much) to write your own stuff and this is how we learned. No Google - just plain old books (very expensive I might add) and brute force learn by doing - which meant failing hundreds of times until it worked. Eventually you remembered most failures and you started getting better. The same goes for music. Look at all these kids playing "Guitar Hero"... I played the guitar when I was a kid and I became really good at it, and so did so many of my friends, although we all were playing different instruments. I can't see how you can learn any skills from playing "Guitar Hero" imho... I got into electronics at a young age but amidst coding demos and playing guitar I never learned as much as I'd wanted and it faded away. Later in life I picked it up again and now I understood better what I was doing and shortly thereafter I had designed my first circuit on my own PCB, and the rest is history. I'm still learning - but I'm having loads of fun, even at my age, and people should try to learn something from scratch and from the bottom up because there is huge satisfaction when it clicks - and the acquired skills can be applied to so many different areas that it's never wasted time to even learn ancient technologies... Heck - it wasn't until I had really learned MC68000 that I fully understood assembler programming - which has helped me enormously when transitioning to electronics, so dive in at the deep end because learning is actually really fun!!! Thanks Dave @ +EEVblog for posting this video!
The "modular libraries and hardware modules" idea looks great from 50,000 feet, but when things don't work and you have nary a clue as to what's wrong, then you'll understand why actually knowing the fundamentals is important.
I haven’t a clue about electronics but at 60 years old disabled person I need to use my brain and learn something new. I've just ordered a starter kit, so hopefully I might learn a bit more about the world around me. I didn’t understand too much about what you said, hopefully the next time I watch this video I'll understand better.
I agree especially about that electronics is much more than plugging parts together following a given circuit plan! Which is about making own projects: planning choosing which components & circuits = searching parts, calculating circuits parts values (ECAD software may be help on complex circuits), make PCB on your own, PCB assembly on your own, testing them, and of course: find mistakes and repair defect circuits, not throw them away. Basic analog electronics *is the lowest foundation* for all higher level electronics e.g. µC (Arduino etc) programming, but doing higher level stuff is ok just be aware about on your level you are working, or your project or problem is about.
I make my living writing code, so a person who writes code is a coder. Nothing wrong with that. I have a very basic understanding with electronics, and I agree with the value in learning electronics hobbyist skills. I enjoy modifying things, including my car, so that they work the way I want them to. The problem is that I'm more familiar with relays and switches rather than MOSFETs and ICs. I can see that learning more about electronic components would really benefit me and possibly let me help others at times. Thanks for your time and for encouraging folks to learn more. There's nothing bad about becoming more intelligent.
I agree 100% !! I hire programmer Interns from college. They program electromechanical test equipment that we design and build. When they program it and it doesn't work, I force them to troubleshoot it with multimeters and oscilloscopes. By the time they leave they ALWAYS tell me that they learned way more than they ever thought they would.
i am new to electronics, but very experienced in computers, so i wanted to learn something totally new, so arduino and raspberry pi is not really what i want to learn, i will eventually use them, but real electronics is what i am interested in learning. plus in the event of an apocalypse (or just a serious change in society), i want to be able to take apart general electronic equipment and make new useful things out of them :)
As a retired EE (and divorced), I am finally able to dedicate an entire room for my Electronics Hobby Lab and spend all I want on benches and equipment. I love building discreet component (with some IC's) projects! It is a lot more fun if you have at least the basic knowledge. Knowledge rules! (even if you are not a EE).
As an IT developer I can very much relate to what you are saying. If you truly want to be a software engineer you need to understand what is happening at a byte level and understand the hardware too. Sure you can write an 'application' easily enough with eclipse or visual studio however to really create a excellent piece of software you need to understand the basic principles of computer science. For this reason I wear a binary watch so that even when I want to know what time it is I need to translate binary to decimal - it keeps my mind working all the time.
that is simply the best explanation and motivation i´ve ever heard. I personally try to do every project with discrete components or 74xx series logic, it´s more reliable and cheaper than MCU but often a challenge to make it work.. but that is the whole fun of electronics.
EEVblog ***** Heilman Hackatronics jon sanford Mongrel Shark Binj Komisar Adafruit Industries You have all awakened old training and experience. Nice to be able to fix TVs and radios again. I had forgotten the joy of tearing trashed electronic devices apart. You have done so much more than taught and retaught me. My sanity remains intact. Thank you. Sincerely.
So many ways to have good, clean fun... like becoming an amateur radio operator. I found out before going to R.P.I. for an EE that you needed to know a LOT more than anyone wanted to admit before you could earn any MONEY at a job you didn't recognize needed doing.
Spent a year at my local TAFE doing a "Basic Electronics Certificate" in '82, didn't pursue it, I went on to Uni to study computer science. However, the knowledge I gained in that year has served me well ever since. Never forgotten the building blocks, V=IR, or even V=I(R+r) where r is the internal resistance of a cell/battery, and P=VI, I couldn't even hazard a guess at how many times they've been useful. Should be a compulsory subject in Primary School and High School. Understanding AND and OR or NAND and XOR is a great introduction to writing formulae in Excel, Binary, Octal and Hexadecimal, great for when you want to use extended character sets in a word processor. Too many benefits to list here, not confined to the electronics hobbyist.
I used to buy non-working (vintage) music electronic and used to fix it, as it saves me loads $$$ YEA!! And it helped me a lot in understanding, and learning how to build up something myself. I bought a Oberheim Matrix-6 for about 100EUR non-working back 1992 and it needed only a new backup battery and new (1st grade) sockets for the CEM 3394 chips...;)
Basic electronics are fun. May come in handy when an everyday electronic/household gizmo fails. If something is broken, you can't break it more, so it's always worth a try to fix it yourself or at least TEAR IT APART... dead caps in TV's and VCR's ...memories :)
To me this is like asking why you should learn basic cooking when you can buy frozen pizzas in the supermarket. Maybe electronics have never been cheaper, but if you look at some of the things people throw just because of a bad cap or so, you begin to understand why we have such a problem with e-waste. A new TV may be cheap these days, but not as cheap as a few capacitors and a bit of solder.
