the introduction page of "a summary of electronics"

This Electronics Overview Guides New Hackers In The Right Direction

September 6, 2021 by Jim Heaney 12 Comments

Many of us don’t have a formal background to build off when taking on new hacks, we have had to teach ourselves complex concepts and learn by doing (or more commonly, by failing). To help new hackers get off the ground a bit easier, [PhilosopherFar3847] created a fantastic starter’s resource on electronics, The Electroagenda Summary of Electronics.

[PhilosipherFar3847] created Electroagenda with the goal of helping amateurs, students, and professionals alike better understand electronics. The Summary of Electronics, one of the more recent additions to the website, is split across 26 sections each breaking down a different electrical concept into easy-to-understand facts with no math or unfamiliar jargon. The summary covers a broad range of electronics, from simple passive components and their uses, up to the basic operating concepts of a microcontroller.

While this resource on its own will not be enough to get a fledgling hacker started making cool circuits, it does provide a very important skill; knowing how to ask the right questions. This base of knowledge provides enough context and keywords to better articulate a challenge and Google-fu a bit more effectively.

Are you the aforementioned fledgling hacker, looking to learn more? check out these nifty logic gates you can plug into each other to build a basic circuit.

[via r/diyelectronics]

Materials For Self Learners

August 11, 2021 by Chris Lott 13 Comments

[João Nuno Carvalho] is a passionate learner. Software engineer by day, he studies all different branches of science and engineering in his spare time. He has organized an impressive list of study / reference materials on a wide variety of subjects that interest him, from aeronautical engineering to quantum mechanics and dozens more in between. In fact, his study lists themselves became so numerous that he collected them into a list of lists, which can be found here on his GitHub repository. These include categories on “How to learn…”

Modern Electronics
Modern Linux
Modern Embedded Systems
Mathematics from the ground up
Physics from the ground up
Modern Compressive Sensing
Modern [C, C++, Rust, Python]
Modern Machine Learning
Modern Aeronautics and Astronautics
Guitar on a budget

Another interesting thing we found in his repo was a list of common electrical components. If you can’t remember off the top of your head the part number of common 100 V PNP bipolar transistor, [João]’s list will point you towards a BD136.

It’s quite an impressive list of resources, and we can’t help but wonder how large [Joã0]’s personal library is if it contains even half of the materials from these lists. Check these out if you want to brush up on a topic — they include not only text books and reference volumes, but forums, blogs, YouTube links, etc. On the topic of learning, we wrote a piece back in 2017 on how learning differs between hobbyists and students. Do you have a favorite list-of-lists that you turn to when you want to brush up or learn about a new subject? Let us know in the comments below.

Are Hackers Being Let Down In Education?

July 23, 2021 by Jenny List 62 Comments

In my work for Hackaday over the years I have been privileged to interact with some of the most creative people I have ever met, I have travelled far more than I ever did when I toiled unseen in an office in Oxford, and I have been lucky enough to hang out in our community’s spaces, camps, and dives across Europe.

Among the huge diversity of skills and ideas though, it’s striking how many of us share similar experiences and histories that have caused us to find our people in rooms full of tools and 3D printers. One of these things I found surprising because I thought I was the only one; I never fit in with the other kids at school, I found much of the teaching incomprehensible and had to figure things out for myself. As an exercise recently I did a straw poll among some of my friends, and found that a significant majority had a similar experience. Clearly something must have gone badly wrong in the way we were being taught that so many of us could have been let down by our schooling, and maybe to understand the needs of our community it’s time to understand why.

Continue reading “Are Hackers Being Let Down In Education?” →

Reinventing The Wheel

May 8, 2021 by Elliot Williams 62 Comments

You’ve got a perfectly working software library to do just exactly what you want. Why aren’t you using it? Some of you are already yelling something about NIH syndrome or reinventing the wheel — I hear you. But at least sometimes, there’s a good enough reason to reinvent the wheel: let’s say you want to learn something.

Mike and I were talking about a cool hack on the podcast: a library that makes a floppy drive work with an Arduino, and even builds out a minimalistic DOS for it. The one thing that [David Hansel] didn’t do by himself was write the FAT library; he used the ever-popular FatFS by [Elm-ChaN]. Mike casually noted that he’s always wanted to write his own FAT library from scratch, just to learn how it works at the fundamental level, and I didn’t even bat an eyelash. Heck, if I had the time, I’d want to do that too!

Look around on Hackaday, and you’ll see tons of hacks where people reinvent the wheel. In this superb soundbar hack, [Michal] spends a while working on the IR protocol by hand until succumbing to the call of IRMP, a library that has it all done for you. But if you read his writeup, he’s not sad; he learned something about IR protocols. This I2C paper tape reader is nothing if not a reinvention of the I2C wheel, but isn’t that the best way to learn?

Yes it is. Think back to the last class you took. The teacher or professor certainly explained something to you in reasonable detail — that’s the job after all. And then you got some homework to do by yourself, and you did it, even though you were probably just going over the same stuff that the prof and countless others have gone through. But by doing it yourself, even though it was “reinventing the wheel”, you learned the material. And I’d wager that you wouldn’t have learned it without.

Of course, when the chips are down and the deadline is breathing hot down your neck, that might be the right time to just include that tried-and-true library. But if you really want to learn something yourself, you have every right to reinvent the wheel.

A Reason To Code

July 4, 2020 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

My son is just getting to the age that puts him in the crosshairs of all of the learn-to-code toys. And admittedly, we’ve been looking at some of those Logo-like toys where you can instruct a turtle-bot to make a few moves, and then to repeat them. After all, if breaking down a problem into sub-problems and automating the repetition isn’t the essence of programming, I don’t know what is.

But here’s the deal: I think drawing ‘bots are cooler than he does. If you ask a kid “hey, do you want a car that can draw?” that’s actually pretty low on the robot list. I’m not saying he won’t get into it once he’s got a little bit more coding under his belt and he can start to make it do fun things, but by itself, drawing just isn’t all that impressive. He can draw just fine, thank-you-very-much.

Meanwhile, I was making a robot arm. Or rather, I started up on yet another never-to-be-completed robot arm. (Frankly, I don’t know what I would do with a robot arm.) But at least I started with the gripper and wrist. Now that’s pretty cool for a kid, but the programming is waaaay too complicated. So I pulled the brains out and hooked up the servos to an RC plane remote. Just wiggling the thing around, duct-taped to the table, got him hooked. And this weekend, we’re building a remote controlled cherry-picker arm to put on a pole, because cherries are in season. His idea!

So no coding. He’s a little too young anyway, IMO. But silly little projects like these, stored deep in his subconscious, will give him a reason to program in the future, will make it plainly obvious that knowing how to program is useful. Now all I need is a reason to finish up a robot arm project…

Hackaday Links: June 21, 2020

June 21, 2020 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

When Lego introduced its Mindstorms line in 1998, in a lot of ways it was like a gateway drug into the world of STEM, even though that term wouldn’t be invented for another couple of years. Children and the obsolete children who begat them drooled over the possibility of combining the Lego building system with motors, sensors, and a real computer that was far and away beyond anything that was available at the time. Mindstorms became hugely influential in the early maker scene and was slowly but steadily updated over the decades, culminating with the recently released Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit. In the thirteen years since the last release, a lot has changed in the market, and we Hackaday scribes had a discussion this week about the continued relevancy of Mindstorms in a time when cheap servos, microcontrollers, and a bewildering array of sensors can be had for pennies. We wonder what the readers think: is a kit that burns a $360 hole in your pocket still worth it? Sound off below.

Are you looking for a way to productively fill some spare time? Plenty of people are these days, and Hackaday has quite a deal for them: Hackaday U! This series of online courses will get you up to speed on a wide range of topics, starting tomorrow with Matthew Alt’s course on reverse engineering with Ghidra. Classes meet online once a week for four weeks, with virtual office hours to help you master the topic. Beside reverse engineering, you can learn about KiCad and FreeCad, quantum computing, real-time processing of audio and sensor data, and later in the year, basic circuit theory. We’ve got other courses lined up to fill out the year, but don’t wait — sign up now! Oh, and the best part? It’s on a pay-as-you-wish basis, with all proceeds going to charity. Get smarter, help others while doing it — what’s not to love about that?

Speaking of virtual learning, the GNU Radio Conference will be moving online for its 10th anniversary year. And while it’s good news that this and other cons have been able to retool and continue their mission of educating and growing this community, it’s still a bummer that there won’t be a chance to network and participate in all the fun events such cons offer. Or perhaps there will — it seems like the Wireless Capture the Flag (CTF) event is still going to happen. Billed as “an immersive plot-driven … competition featuring the GNU Radio framework and many other open-source tools, satellite communications, cryptography, and surreal global landscapes,” it certainly sounds like fun. We’d love to find out exactly how this CTF competition will work.

Everyone needs a way to unwind, and sometimes the best way to do that is to throw yourself into a project of such intricacy and delicate work that you’re forced into an almost meditative state by it. We’ve seen beautiful examples of that with the wonderful circuit sculptures of Mohit Bhoite and Jiří Praus, but here’s something that almost defies belief: a painstakingly detailed diorama of a vintage IBM data center. Created by the aptly named [minatua], each piece of this sculpture is a work of art in its own right and represents the “big iron” of the 1400 series of computers from the early 1960s. The level of detail is phenomenal — the green and white striped fanfold paper coming out of the 1403 line printer has tiny characters printed on it, and on the 729 tape drives, the reels spin and the lights flash. It’s incredible, all the more so because there don’t appear to be any 3D-printed parts — everything is scratch built from raw materials. Check it out.

As you can imagine, the Hackaday tip line attracts a fair number of ideas of the scientifically marginal variety. Although we’re not too fond of spammers, we try to be kind to everyone who bothers to send us a tip, but with a skeptical eye when terms like “free energy” come across. Still, we found this video touting to Nikola Tesla’s free energy secrets worth passing on. It’s just how we roll.

And finally, aside from being the first full day of summer, today is Father’s Day. We just want to say Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, both those that inspired and guided us as we were growing up, and those who are currently passing the torch to the next generation. It’s not easy to do sometimes, but tackling a project with a kid is immensely important work, and hats off to all the dads who make the time for it.

Machine Builds Rise From The Ashes

June 13, 2020 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

I was enchanted by a failed project this week. [Andrew Consroe]’s CNC scroll saw doesn’t work yet, but the emphasis is on the word “yet”. Heck, even when it does work, it might not make sense, but that’s not the point anyway.

A scroll saw table has a vertical reciprocating blade perpendicular to a table, a lot like a band saw but with a shorter blade. You push the wood sheet to be cut into the blade, and because it’s thin, you can twist and turn all sorts of interesting jigsaw-puzzle shapes. [Andrew] automated this with an X-Y gantry and an innovative geared rotating ring, needed to keep the wood fed into the cutting edge of the blade.

It’s a crazy contraption, and a difficult and unique movement planning problem, and watching it move in the video is a joy. But it’s not working either: errors in the motion add up over a cut, and he’s ended up snapping a blade on every piece. And this is version three of the device!

But here comes the inspiration. First, the only reason he’s filming this is to keep a log of how the project looked at this phase — he’s already planning out the next one. Second, this is the soul of learning by doing. You don’t learn anything unless you’re trying something new.

And finally, [Andrew]’s project reminds me of why I love machine builds in the age of rapid prototyping. Blazing through three entirely different machines cost him essentially nothing. Tearing apart version one left him with the same stepper motors, aluminum extrusions, and electronics as when he started out. Except that he now knew so much more about his particular problem space. Now he’s ready to go again.

So if you’re at all robotically inclined, but you’re looking at the cost of motors, belts, bearings, and steel, don’t think of it as an expense for this project, but for years’ worth of iterations, and maybe even fully different machines.

Just be sure to take [Andrew]’s lead and get it down and documented before you take it apart! Heck, send it in to Hackaday and it’ll live forever.