Learning electronics

by Ray on April 25, 2012

I’ve had my Arduino for the best part of a couple of weeks now and have been creating Sparkfun’s circuits and programs as they came in the kit. Whilst it is loads of fun, I’m lacking a good understanding of why certain things work the way they do.

I’ve been reading online as well as offline, trying to understand how this electronics world hangs together. I’ve spoken to a reasonably young electrician and an older electrical engineer to check my reading and comprehension. They’ve surprised me though. In one exchange with them I was explaining that to my surprise I’d read that the flow of electrons is actually the opposite of what I’d always thought (negative to positive, not positive to negative). I was told I was wrong, that it was indeed positive to negative (!).  So which way and who is right, the text books, or the practitioners? It might not matter in the grand scheme of things, but I want to know. To me, it feels like I’m missing major fundamental knowledge to be able to break out on my own, beyond the Sparkfun tutorials.

So, what don’t I know? Let me count a few of the things (but trust me, the list is a lot longer as you’ve probably gathered by now):

  • Does electricity flow from an Arduino Input/Output port, the voltage port or the ground port?
  • Why do you sometimes need to run a 5 volt line to the breadboard, when the circuit seems to work fine without it?
  • Why do you seem to need to attach resistors late in the example circuits on what seems to be the return run to ground? Shouldn’t they be on the voltage line into the circuit?
  • What is ground anyway?
  • How is a breadboard plumbed?

I need to know these things. At this point it’s just not making sense to me, and I don’t like feeling as frustrated as Sylvester watching Tweety in a cage.

So, how to tackle this dilemma? I think I need to do a few things:

  • Get some tools, especially a multimeter
  • Get some electronics fundamentals under my belt
  • Redo the Sparkfun sample circuits probing and measuring them as I go

For the fundamentals, some light reading is in order, Dummies Guide to Electronics, for instance. I’ll blog what I learn under the “Electronics 101″ tag. For the Sparkfun sample circuits, I’ll blog that under the “Arduino 101″ tag.

First things first, I’m off to learn about multimeters.

~ Ray.

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Hello electronics world!

by Ray on April 15, 2012

Taking a week out of my busy work schedule to mind the kids during the first week of their school holidays, I decided to do some TV Turfing (a.k.a. Web Surfing). Being quite an avid photographer, Flickr is a fairly large consumer of my monthly bandwidth allowance. With the kids in full holiday mode, sleeping in until lunch time, I aimlessly browsed Flickr and happily stumbled upon some really cool pictures of water droplets frozen in air, mid splash. One thing led to another and I discovered a world of off the shelf, as well as custom built, photographic sensors and triggers. Having an IT development background, not wanting to splash out (ahem, pardon the pun) and buy an expensive camera trigger,  I thought, why not follow the lead of other tinkerers out there and build my own. Interesting challenge, I thought. Bring my coding knowledge out of the virtual computer/web bound world and into the physical hardware world! But how do I do that? I knew I needed to learn something about electronics, but something practical, not theoretical. Theoretical would probably bore me to death.

My web browsing fast became research, and before long I found myself reading up on the Arduino open source hardware platform, it was after all, being used by most of the creators of home brew photo triggers out there. Spent some more “research” time on YouTube, and my mind was blown! People were creating things way beyond photo sensors and triggers. Things like robots, 3d printers, self stabilising quad copters… Incredible! I started to explode with ideas, but no practical way to implement them.

That was it. “I have to learn electronics” I muttered to myself. I looked on the web for an Arduino supplier, plenty of online sources, but I wanted it now! Waiting for delivery would fizz the idea. By the time I took delivery, I’d be back at work and have little time to play. I found a retailer 40 minutes drive from where I live in Melbourne Australia, woke the kids up, told them we were (at least I was) embarking on a grand new adventure and made a fast track to the store. I bought the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit from Ocean Controls in Seaford, Victoria, got it home and within an hour, made an LED flash like strobe at a rave dance party. Simple circuit, simple code… The Arduino platform is way too cool.

This blog is really only here for my reference and to log my learnings, but, if you’re anything like me (fat, middle aged –at least I’m not balding– a complete electronics numb skull and in need of a challenge), I hope it’s of some use to you as well. I really don’t know anything about electronics, my AC from DC, I don’t even really know what a multimeter is used for… but I’m planning on changing that, and blogging about that learning process here.

Oh, and the domain name of this blog? Ard(uino) plus (electr)onics. Corny, isn’t it?

~ Ray.

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