Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?

Hobby electronics & robotics. I can make an LED blink on a ESP8266 (it's been a while), but that's it. I'd like to get more familiar with a multimeter, figuring out broken kids toys, etc. but it's a bit daunting. Maybe there's too many options and not enough constraints. I'm not sure.

For robotics, I recently came across this course to learn the basics: https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2. Haven't started it yet though.

Highly recommend LeRobot.

This gotta come up with a project you want for yourself and make it. I remember soldering one of those 2x16 LCD screens and it had a short so it would start smoking to designing/3D printing my own quadruped with an IMU/navigation. I did cheat and not use inverse kinematics, I watched videos on other insect-style quads walking and I programmed it manually.

I think main gotcha is power distribution and shared ground eg. using a boost converter or regulator to boost/downgrade voltage and which servos/sensors uses what. Later have to be concerned with too much current being drawn but yeah.

I used these green proto boards you can solder onto as a step up above breadboard but not my own PCB.

Check out the Arduino starter kit. This is how I started with electrics. It comes with everything you need including a great book which walks you through everything. Very much worth the money.

https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-mu...

I have found the Make: Electronics series of books by Charles Platt to be a good mix of basics / fundamentals and fun projects.

For this, what takes a while is to just tinker and fry components several times. Get a breadboard, get several sensors, try to design something and iterate on your design. Plan to fry sensors and IC's. Also helps to read some basic electrical theory and know what the role of different components are.

The way I got proficient is with hobbyist PCB design. What helped me is starting with schematics and datasheets and planning to finish with an assembled board. I started designing PCB's and having them assembled with JLCPCB (quite cheap: $20 or so for a run of 5 boards; $120-$150 fully assembled). I fried 2 boards before the 3rd rev booted up, then from there it's optimization. I consider the $200/mo or so in PCBA, whether boards work or not, to be my "EE education" -- cost efficient compared to university fees! And $200 is sort of like the "exam," it's costly enough to make me really think twice about component selection/placement/etc.

Not saying that's the approach you want to take because that might be hardcore / not someplace you want to get to. But I spent a long long time really wondering how electricity really works and like why you need capacitors, inductors, op-amps, etc. It never made sense to me until I created my own schematic, chose my own parts, and understood why I chose the parts I did and connected them the way I did.

did you understand theory deeply first like Kirchhoff , node analysis

See my previous comment here for how to get started - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628025

I highly recommend downloading Understanding Signals with the Propscope from Parallax (available for free online) and following the tutorials from it with an Arduino+Analog Discovery 2/3 device. You can use the Digilent "Real Analog" learning course along with it - https://digilent.com/reference/learn/courses/real-analog/sta...

The real motivation in Electronics comes from understanding in visual form (using a Oscilloscope/Multimeter etc.) how things work in a circuit and how your calculations match up to what you see on the screen. Even as simple as the beginner LED circuit can teach you a lot when you use a potentiometer and see how voltage/current graphs change.

This just reinforces the fact that it's inaccessible. There's no way I'm literally throwing $200 a month in the trash on a hobby.

$200 is for assembled boards. I learned electronics and spent about $200 on it in two years, that includes cheapest soldering iron. Don't order assembled boards when you are starting. Order cheapest bluepill (STM32F103C8T6) or non-original arduino clone and start on breadboard with that. Make pcb's only when you're ready to learn more. Expect that your first one will not work or will require some "rewiring", but second one may already work. You might start with some cheap through-hole components, they are a little easier to re-wire or re-solder, it's a good idea to put your first microcontroller in socket.

Ah alright that makes more sense, I missed that part, my bad.

I'm a EE masters student and I also want to reinforce how inaccessible EE is and that I don't really recommend it as a hobby. EE is a very mature field and it's very math heavy for a reason. The second you move past the hobby boards, stuff becomes really difficult and really expensive really fast. If your end goal is to create toys for kids, then it's fine as a hobby. But without the formal training and lab access you are going to struggle to get past that point so it's pretty much impossible to turn the hobby into something more. Unlike software, where tinkering genuinely has the possibility of turning your side projects into careers. Hell, if you don't live in EE hotspot locations, I wouldn't even recommend it as a career anymore. Software is where it's at, even in the age of AI.

Thanks for the link! This looks perfect for what I'm looking for.

I have produced the magical blue smoke multiple times out of my own mistakes. It’s part of the process!

Thanks a lot for the recommendations.

Would you recommend the Real Analog course independently?

What does the Propscope one offer that Real Analog doesn’t? The Propscope one looks kinda old so I was wondering what I’d miss if I only used Real Analog.

Also not sure if there’s a parts kit for the Propscope one that I can buy.

You should check out Ben Eater's channel on YouTube. He has a series about building an 8 bit computer from scratch + another one about building a 6502-based computer. It's very very accessible if you know some really basic hardware stuff (and for the things that you don't know already, he gives enough context to start googling).

That's only for the heavy analog stuff. If you're into the more modern digital stuff, you basically never for any reason need to breadboard prototype, everything can be done with I2C modules and the like.

Burning a part is incredibly rare with this kind of stuff, if you're willing to put in the time to learn about it before actually building it.

Sure, you can do the "Real Analog" course independently. Study it with a Parts Kit from Digilent+Analog Discovery 2/3 device(AD2/AD3)+Arduino board. That would be a nice entry point into Electronics+Embedded Systems.

I was referring to the tutorial pdf of Understanding Signals with Propscope containing very nice step-by-step lessons in using a USB Oscilloscope for measuring various circuit parameters. The Propscope itself is very old/underpowered (not being sold anymore) and not needed. You just use AD2/AD3 with its Waveforms software to do the same experiments with any board.

Note that if you use a AVR-based Arduino you can learn to program at the higher Arduino API/library level and then at the lower direct AVR level both with the same board. For learning Arduino Programming see Exploring Arduino by Jeremy Blum and for direct AVR programming see Make: AVR Programming by Elliot Williams.

Thanks for the tips.

I placed an order for the AD3+Parts Kit and excited to dive in!

Nice. You also need to get the BNC Adapter board and probes for AD3 (available separately or as part of the pro bundle). Might also want to take a look at other available adapters for AD3.

AD3 resources (docs/tutorials/accessories/books etc.) - https://digilent.com/reference/test-and-measurement/analog-d...

I'm starting out as well. If you prefer coding in python, raspberry pi or anything adafruit is a good place to start. If you're cool with c/c++ Arduino ecosystem is quite mature . I decided to stick to the former so it's a less steeper learning curve for me and my little one. Get a BBC Micro:bit v2 and/or a CircuitPlayground Express. Both have a ton of sensors on board (temp, tilt, light, humidity etc) and some leds/neo-pixels to play around. Once you play with some of that, and want to get your hands dirty with breadboarding and soldering, get a basic kit (e.g. raspberry pi pico etc) and use MakeCode to try out some simple circuits with your microbit or circuitplayground express as the signal provider, play with servos, hobby motors, do some basic projects. Once you feel you're a bit proficient, might one to check out LeRobot for an open source robotic arm that you could train with reinfocement learning.. this is not exhaustive or the only path, there's many others, this is just my 2cents. Hope this helps!

I have a feeling that in circuitry the focus is to manipulative the components so that the final chart is similar to what you want (e.g. a sine wave), and then try to improve the quality and reduce the # of components to save cost. Is it correct?