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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
more than half the things people use arduino's for these days could be done with 555s and a couple transistors anyways. Arduino was meant to be a learning tool for electronics newbs but It makes you wonder if its missing the mark, when people ask these types of questions...
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.
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!)
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.
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!
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.
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...
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!
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......?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have to give some credit to the Open source hardware movement. I started blinking LED's with my Adruino and that led to this youtube channel and the desire to dive deeper into electronics. Arduino is my Gateway drug to this electronics addiction I have. Thank you Dave for being a super supporter and entertaining educator.
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"
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.
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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 UA-cam channel. Thank you :-)
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 😊
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This question comes up in "State of Electronics" a lot. As I'm currently editing those episodes, I listen again to your views and can not agree more. There is an extreme danger of not only loosing the skill of trouble shooting but not understanding the fundamentals that lie beneath more complex systems, creates opportunities for 'someone else' who has a deeper knowledge, to be more of an expert then you. It also means your entry into electronics starts very high up on the levels of understanding which most likely means your knowledge of analogue electronics will be limited. It seems to me that analogue electronic skills, despite all the advancements in digital and software engineering is still vital for sensing the world around you, and outputting your result back into the mostly analogue world as well. Great video Dave!
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.
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!
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!!!!
Vladimir Popovic To expand a bit on Dave's response: To analyse and design circuits, you need algebra, that's it-be very comfortable with high school algebra (including trig and logarithms), and a bit of linear algebra (how to solve a system of equations using matrices and Cramer's rule is the minimum, anything else is optional). I often avoid linear algebra if I can find a way of analysing intuitively/step-by-step too. If you're using discrete ICs, rather than discrete transistors or op-amps, you're even less likely to need linear algebra. Even then, a lot of the time if you don't need a full symbolic solution, you can simulate-for example, if you just want to see the effect of a capacitor's value on a circuit, you can do a parametric sweep with say 10 capacitor values to see what happens. If you need the full symbolic value, you can set up the equations using nodal/mesh analysis and get Mathematica to solve it for you, avoiding having to solve the system of equations. For practical engineering work, you can and often want to avoid doing hand analysis except as a way of gaining design insight. Going further into more applied mathematics, as part of learning electronics, you might want to look at frequency-domain stuff-Fourier series, Fourier transform, Laplace transform, and how to look at a frequency-dependent circuit in the Laplace domain. But you never really need to do the integrations or learn the pure maths definitions etc.; only learning e.g. that a capacitor is 1/(sC) and then working out the algebra to find a transfer function is enough, and using a look-up table to figure out that a square pulse has a certain Laplace transform is enough. Those basic skills will let you do fairly advanced electronics (filters, or figuring out why your circuit is ringing badly, or analysing a low bandwidth problem in your op-amp circuit, etc.) without getting into calculus or more advanced applied maths.
EEVblog It depends. EE, yes, it gets ugly (or fun, depending on your outlook of differential equations). EET (which I have a BS in) not so much; the highest level was doing fourier series in communications/signal processing and maxwell's equations in electromagnetics. The hardest for me was the latter case, polyphase systems (a TI89 helps a lot), and really gnarly circuit analysis (transistor based zener voltage regualtion and transfer functions of weird active filters come to mind). But for "hobbiest" level stuff, basic algebra will do just fine. Same for 80% of "practical" stuff (especially in EET where we often use tables to short-cut things, like fourier and laplace transforms).
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 agree, what ever you want to do in your life, you should learn the fundamentals. The more you know about the fundamentals on how things work, the better your understanding and conclusions will be. Thats for anything in life. The more you know, about how anything works in our world, the more better your conclusions in analysing it will be. I agree that if anyone wants to learn something like electronics, they should appreciate how the basics work. It is a good question, and for me, your right in how you answered it.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
I really agree with your opinion on this topic, but what you didn't cover was how to start learning electronics. I have my own Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc, but I really want to get into actual electronics like you've mentioned here. How should I go about learning these skills?
Devin Keeney Study Kirchhoff's current law and voltage law, learn how to do voltage and current division really well. That's where you should start. I recommend you buy an old textbook. The material is REALLY dry, so keep lots of resistors, some capacitors, inductors, LEDs, MOSFETS/BJTs, jumper wires, batteries , a voltmeter and a breadboard around. That way if you get really bored of the theory you can build circuits similar to the ones in the book. Calculate the voltages and currents at different nodes and then use the voltmeter to check your work. My best piece of advice is to balance every piece of theory you can with hands on experiments. The theory is VERY important, but if you don't translate what you learned to the real world you'll just forget it all.
Devin Keeney Learn how to use a multimeter, soldering iron and have fun playing flashy LEDs, small dc motor...blah blah. or www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-modern-electronics.html
Start slowly, there's no shame in knowing the hell out of just one thing. The problem you might run into is the rabbits hole. Which isn't really a problem, it's actually how I learn. Look up the simplest circuit, say a voltage divider. Learn the (relatively) simple math associated with it. Take something you're interested in, like an Arduino, and just take it apart slowly. Whatever you do take small bites, but eat the whole thing.
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
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.
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.
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.
It always comes down to this : either you learn for the fun, or you learn because you have no other choice. If electronics is boring to someone and he can always get around it with pre-build modules for his personnal projetcs, there is no reason to bother that much.
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).
this is why i like you dave !!! you deserve a million thumbs up upon this video .... they cant understand the difference till they got stuck ... but more probably those arduino and pre-prepared stuff fanatics will quit their projects as fast as they encounter the first hurdles
wssifi yassine Not when electronics are the hurdle! In those cases the arduino's, raspberry pi's and all their add ons are the solution. Just like 3d printers allow you to make parts that used to require milling, turning and welding skills. It allows the more creative, less technical people to actually design and build things. If I want to buy 10 strings of Xmas lights and make them light up differently during different parts of the day, respond to my presence and dance to the beat of the music, then I can build that without knowing any, or very little electronics.
Raspoetin a Exactly when the electronics are the hurdle ! i like the analogy between electronics and 3d printing that you have used already . in fact yes 3d printing helps people creating new stuff .... but yet she does`nt replace steal or Aluminuim made structure those used in plane and cars. When it comes to electronics also there is a huge difference between knowing and not knowing basic and advanced electronics ,combinatorics , power supplies and computer architecture ....of course you still could make sthg cool and funny without knowing anything but if you wanna do sthg more interresting than Xmas lights. you should start giving more attention to basic electronics subjects . Its really funny to make sthg out of scratch . those who prepared , pre-compiled and pre-tested arduino API are having more fun than their costumers .... You Arduino folks are missing the whole fun, the knack of troubleshooting, programming in assembly and designing your own board ... come on !!! what you people are afraid of try it out ...and if sthg explode what the heck let it go ... its the beauty of science ...later on you will go further and start designing your own more powerfull MCU or CPU and test them with Fpga ... then you are ready to manufacture your product and maybe you will be the next silicon valley star !!! else what is the point of making sthg with arduino that you could buy it ready ! and please don`t tell me that you love experimenting you people are just writing back what they had told you to do .... its a hobby, a passion if you don`t wanna know more about it its not yours
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.
Dave, this of course begs the question...how do you recommend the average home hobbyist learn basic electronics? Book title, and/or on-line course? Thanks for the great videos. Tom
i want to learn electronics, is it better to learn by discovery or theory? i am surrounded by ppl who are technician tho. Just want some honest opinions.
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 :)
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.
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 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.
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
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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 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.
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.
My dad was an engineer, and when I was younger I wanted to follow in his footsteps, but I ended up in computing. I have a couple of raspberry pi's, but I've never really put them through anything of note, and I'm still really keen to get involved in electronics and meld my knowledge of computing and what I learn from electronics together. Where is the best place to start?
I know this is an old video but it's so true. This conversation reminds me of back in the 90s when we had "script kiddies" trying to run DDOS exploits and others. It's the same when you ask a youngling if they know computers and they response includes words like Twitter, Snapchat, etc. The low level coders (e.g. assembly / machine coders) probably said this same thing when languages like C, Pascal, Basic, etc. came out. Digressing, I love your videos! You are so helpful and knowledgeable.
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.
Completely agree! Even with Arduino and other similar platforms, there's not a lot you can do without basic electrical knowledge. On the other hand Arduino is a great way for new people getting into the hobby because you can make a couple of simple projects pretty quickly and then have a go at changing them, experimenting, and learning along the way.
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 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 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.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
There is only one thing to say: I agree with that.
amen
Dude I love ur battery vids, i learned so much off the battery capacity vid and am now expand of it.
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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....
Love your videos! Give a man a fish, feed them for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed them for life.
Because knowing why you just blew up your new toy is important before you do exactly the same thing second time around :P
Darren Woods True!
Darren Woods Because discarded LED TVs and monitors are great for the cost of a handful of electrolytic caps in the PSU.
hhahaha so true
EEVblog Because I can and it's fun?
No thanks I had spam for breakfast
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I wholeheartedly agree with you Dave. As you said, absolutely nothing wrong with picking up an Arduino and programming it, it is just not electronics.
hi guys, the greatest success that ive had was by using the Gregs Electro Blog (just google it) definately the best info that I've tried.
So electronics doesn t equal programming ?
God ,i did not know that.
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.
This is the reason why I want learn right here. Having knowledge about things is vital. Not only for you but for your pockets.
Great story. The lesson learned was worth more than the $150 saved :-)
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
@@Autotrope Fake news. There was never a mono CD ROM. Go a make up a new one.
yeah this story sounds more like a quality defect more than anything but still nice that the man fixed it
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 I agree. More fundamental videos would be great !
billyrubin666 Oh, yeah! Please!
Also, more dumpster diving! I surely miss those!
exactly. going back to basics would help alot of us just starting out. Dumpster diving would be fun too.😊
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.
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As a programmer I agree that arduinos and raspberry pies only make you a programmer, not a legit electronics guy.
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
Arduino doesn't make you a programmer at all. Arduino is like 'Paint by Numbers' You may end up with a pretty painting but you are not an artist.
@@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.
arduino doesn't make you a programmers you're still using someone library lol whether is software or hardware you're still an end user.
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 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 This is probably the best explanation
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.
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!
dismayer666
Agree. : )
dismayer666 I'd say it's more akin to building the guitar, radio or mp3 player in the first place.
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'm a child of the 1960's - the HeathKit era! So I still love this stuff and have worked in it for 40 years!
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.
@@ferreyoyornc.a233 Shut up, spammer
more than half the things people use arduino's for these days could be done with 555s and a couple transistors anyways. Arduino was meant to be a learning tool for electronics newbs but It makes you wonder if its missing the mark, when people ask these types of questions...
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.
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!)
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.
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!
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.
Dave, those upside down scopes are killing me! :)
The Bright Pixel They are just sleeping.
MadeOfSolder Shhhh.... you might wake them.
The Bright Pixel That's an Australian Thing something to do with being at the bottom of the planet.
The Bright Pixel its killing us all my friend.. its killing us all!!!
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...
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!
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......?
My son and I just finished watching this video and we both agree with Dave! :)
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
I've learned this the hard way, this is why I'm here watching your videos.
Keep up with the good work Dave!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have to give some credit to the Open source hardware movement. I started blinking LED's with my Adruino and that led to this youtube channel and the desire to dive deeper into electronics. Arduino is my Gateway drug to this electronics addiction I have. Thank you Dave for being a super supporter and entertaining educator.
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"
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.
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 UA-cam channel.
Thank you :-)
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 😊
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.
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.
Great video and i was happy to post and share with my Facebook friends.
Thank you for taking the time to make it.
Cheers
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.
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.
Wish I watched these videos 20 years ago.
In terms of learning, best channel on UA-cam. Thank you so much.
This Channel is gold mine, thank you Dave, from Tunisia
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.
This is the same as saying "I don't need to learn English, when I'm in England I and I need something I'll point at it."
This question comes up in "State of Electronics" a lot. As I'm currently editing those episodes, I listen again to your views and can not agree more. There is an extreme danger of not only loosing the skill of trouble shooting but not understanding the fundamentals that lie beneath more complex systems, creates opportunities for 'someone else' who has a deeper knowledge, to be more of an expert then you. It also means your entry into electronics starts very high up on the levels of understanding which most likely means your knowledge of analogue electronics will be limited. It seems to me that analogue electronic skills, despite all the advancements in digital and software engineering is still vital for sensing the world around you, and outputting your result back into the mostly analogue world as well. Great video Dave!
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 is so true. People tend to say they are electronics hobbyist when all they do is hook up some modules together and write a few lines of codes.
Really nice explanation! This is exactly the reason why I have been learning basic eletronics as a hobbyist.
4 Years old, but still friggin up-to-date. Thank you! I've been asked this myself by my "Maker"-Friends
"I hope it doesn't work so you learn something".
Best piece of advice you can get in your whole life!
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!
This is by far, one of Dave's best videos!
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!!!!
Does it have any advantages if you learn some mathematics before electronics?
Vladimir Popovic You only need basic math for the majority of practical electronics work. Different for an electronics degree though, very math heavy.
Vladimir Popovic To expand a bit on Dave's response:
To analyse and design circuits, you need algebra, that's it-be very comfortable with high school algebra (including trig and logarithms), and a bit of linear algebra (how to solve a system of equations using matrices and Cramer's rule is the minimum, anything else is optional). I often avoid linear algebra if I can find a way of analysing intuitively/step-by-step too. If you're using discrete ICs, rather than discrete transistors or op-amps, you're even less likely to need linear algebra.
Even then, a lot of the time if you don't need a full symbolic solution, you can simulate-for example, if you just want to see the effect of a capacitor's value on a circuit, you can do a parametric sweep with say 10 capacitor values to see what happens. If you need the full symbolic value, you can set up the equations using nodal/mesh analysis and get Mathematica to solve it for you, avoiding having to solve the system of equations. For practical engineering work, you can and often want to avoid doing hand analysis except as a way of gaining design insight.
Going further into more applied mathematics, as part of learning electronics, you might want to look at frequency-domain stuff-Fourier series, Fourier transform, Laplace transform, and how to look at a frequency-dependent circuit in the Laplace domain. But you never really need to do the integrations or learn the pure maths definitions etc.; only learning e.g. that a capacitor is 1/(sC) and then working out the algebra to find a transfer function is enough, and using a look-up table to figure out that a square pulse has a certain Laplace transform is enough. Those basic skills will let you do fairly advanced electronics (filters, or figuring out why your circuit is ringing badly, or analysing a low bandwidth problem in your op-amp circuit, etc.) without getting into calculus or more advanced applied maths.
EEVblog It depends. EE, yes, it gets ugly (or fun, depending on your outlook of differential equations). EET (which I have a BS in) not so much; the highest level was doing fourier series in communications/signal processing and maxwell's equations in electromagnetics. The hardest for me was the latter case, polyphase systems (a TI89 helps a lot), and really gnarly circuit analysis (transistor based zener voltage regualtion and transfer functions of weird active filters come to mind).
But for "hobbiest" level stuff, basic algebra will do just fine. Same for 80% of "practical" stuff (especially in EET where we often use tables to short-cut things, like fourier and laplace transforms).
Binary and hexadecimal are two things you need learn in maths
Thank you, appreciate it very much.
6:39 - Unfortunately i've come to learn that there IS a name for that kind of person: embedded systems programmer.
Good points, Dave.
krawutzimon There are dedicated people for that? And here I am, sitting in my room, programming *and* designing the boards I make... XD
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.
Spilly well, my comment is about same stuff as you wrote.
I agree, what ever you want to do in your life, you should learn the fundamentals.
The more you know about the fundamentals on how things work, the better your understanding and conclusions will be.
Thats for anything in life. The more you know, about how anything works in our world, the more better your conclusions in analysing it will be.
I agree that if anyone wants to learn something like electronics, they should appreciate how the basics work.
It is a good question, and for me, your right in how you answered it.
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.
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.
So far, two people have watched this that don't understand electronics and like Arduinos.
Leave Arduinos alone, dude
I do dude. Never touched the things.
Ahahaha
in my whole in youtube this is first time I hear reasonable speech in my life good Work man keep it up
Very important point well made Dave!
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.
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,
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.
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.
I really agree with your opinion on this topic, but what you didn't cover was how to start learning electronics. I have my own Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc, but I really want to get into actual electronics like you've mentioned here. How should I go about learning these skills?
Devin Keeney Study Kirchhoff's current law and voltage law, learn how to do voltage and current division really well. That's where you should start. I recommend you buy an old textbook. The material is REALLY dry, so keep lots of resistors, some capacitors, inductors, LEDs, MOSFETS/BJTs, jumper wires, batteries , a voltmeter and a breadboard around. That way if you get really bored of the theory you can build circuits similar to the ones in the book. Calculate the voltages and currents at different nodes and then use the voltmeter to check your work.
My best piece of advice is to balance every piece of theory you can with hands on experiments. The theory is VERY important, but if you don't translate what you learned to the real world you'll just forget it all.
Devin Keeney Learn how to use a multimeter, soldering iron and have fun playing flashy LEDs, small dc motor...blah blah. or www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-modern-electronics.html
Start slowly, there's no shame in knowing the hell out of just one thing. The problem you might run into is the rabbits hole. Which isn't really a problem, it's actually how I learn.
Look up the simplest circuit, say a voltage divider. Learn the (relatively) simple math associated with it.
Take something you're interested in, like an Arduino, and just take it apart slowly. Whatever you do take small bites, but eat the whole thing.
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
Thanks..It is my hobby from when I was like 7-10,no joke
And I will be making something like a computer from gates myself in couple of years
There are times I forget you live in Australia. I'm up at 2:30 am in the U.S.A an I see a new video from you.
Being English its how I find most of my UA-cam content, Its great for when I can't sleep!
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.
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.
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.
It always comes down to this : either you learn for the fun, or you learn because you have no other choice. If electronics is boring to someone and he can always get around it with pre-build modules for his personnal projetcs, there is no reason to bother that much.
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).
This is so true im really new to the electronics stuff and I kind of feel like wiring an aduino isn't enough to properly understand electronics
this is why i like you dave !!!
you deserve a million thumbs up upon this video .... they cant understand the difference till they got stuck ... but more probably those arduino and pre-prepared stuff fanatics will quit their projects as fast as they encounter the first hurdles
wssifi yassine Not when electronics are the hurdle!
In those cases the arduino's, raspberry pi's and all their add ons are the solution. Just like 3d printers allow you to make parts that used to require milling, turning and welding skills.
It allows the more creative, less technical people to actually design and build things.
If I want to buy 10 strings of Xmas lights and make them light up differently during different parts of the day, respond to my presence and dance to the beat of the music, then I can build that without knowing any, or very little electronics.
Raspoetin a Exactly when the electronics are the hurdle !
i like the analogy between electronics and 3d printing that you have used already . in fact yes 3d printing helps people creating new stuff .... but yet she does`nt replace steal or Aluminuim made structure those used in plane and cars. When it comes to electronics also there is a huge difference between knowing and not knowing basic and advanced electronics ,combinatorics , power supplies and computer architecture ....of course you still could make sthg cool and funny without knowing anything but if you wanna do sthg more interresting than Xmas lights. you should start giving more attention to basic electronics subjects . Its really funny to make sthg out of scratch . those who prepared , pre-compiled and pre-tested arduino API are having more fun than their costumers .... You Arduino folks are missing the whole fun, the knack of troubleshooting, programming in assembly and designing your own board ... come on !!! what you people are afraid of try it out ...and if sthg explode what the heck let it go ... its the beauty of science ...later on you will go further and start designing your own more powerfull MCU or CPU and test them with Fpga ... then you are ready to manufacture your product and maybe you will be the next silicon valley star !!! else what is the point of making sthg with arduino that you could buy it ready ! and please don`t tell me that you love experimenting you people are just writing back what they had told you to do .... its a hobby, a passion if you don`t wanna know more about it its not yours
wssifi yassine My kids would strongly disagree that electronics is much more interesting than dancing xmas lights...
"the reddit", it's like when old people say "facespace"
***** facespace....nah man even old people know what's facebook
***** Myface
***** "facemash" was the beginings of what is now known as Facebook fyi.
Cameron Marks Haha really?! Sounds like FacePalm!
***** i love The Reddit internet forum website
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.
Dave, this of course begs the question...how do you recommend the average home hobbyist learn basic electronics? Book title, and/or on-line course? Thanks for the great videos. Tom
i want to learn electronics, is it better to learn by discovery or theory? i am surrounded by ppl who are technician tho. Just want some honest opinions.
Thanks
You waited half a second longer than usual before saying hi, this bothered me far more than is reasonable.
pypes84 Yeah, it disturbed me to the bone too!
pypes84 He started recording with a remote and didn't cut that extra second in editing. It's more off the cuff then his regular off the cuff videos.
NZ SNIPER I've come to expect a higher standard of editing from Dave's unedited off the cuff videos.
pypes84 Keep calm and carry on.
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 :)
I have similar motivations, when the apocalypse happens i wanna be the electronics Wizz in the team
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.
Such true words. This video can be applied to any science, engineering, or mathematics field.
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.
Im only 15 and started at 13. The electronics hobby is a great one. I have learned so much
Troubleshooting my arduino projects is exactly what brought me to the beautiful world of electronics.
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.
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
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 own many classic keyboards so knowing how to get them working again requires a real knowledge of electronics.
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.
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.
My dad was an engineer, and when I was younger I wanted to follow in his footsteps, but I ended up in computing. I have a couple of raspberry pi's, but I've never really put them through anything of note, and I'm still really keen to get involved in electronics and meld my knowledge of computing and what I learn from electronics together. Where is the best place to start?
when you have a little bit of knowledge in basic electronic you can hook up the book, the art of electronics, it is great.
I know this is an old video but it's so true. This conversation reminds me of back in the 90s when we had "script kiddies" trying to run DDOS exploits and others. It's the same when you ask a youngling if they know computers and they response includes words like Twitter, Snapchat, etc. The low level coders (e.g. assembly / machine coders) probably said this same thing when languages like C, Pascal, Basic, etc. came out. Digressing, I love your videos! You are so helpful and knowledgeable.
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.
To learn any fundamental is important for extended idea and total skill of something. I agree 100 % suggestion of Dave.
Completely agree! Even with Arduino and other similar platforms, there's not a lot you can do without basic electrical knowledge. On the other hand Arduino is a great way for new people getting into the hobby because you can make a couple of simple projects pretty quickly and then have a go at changing them, experimenting, and learning along the way.
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 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.
6:40 The term is "script kiddy". It applies to a range of "copy tutorials / stack overflow" people regardless of whether it's dev boards or websites.
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.