Re:Ask HN: Where to start for hobby circuit design
by lmilcin on Sunday January 31, 2021 @07:59AM
(#25978469)
Hi. I am in the same boat as you. I have been developing different kinds of software for almost 20 years but only recently got interested in electronics and specifically electronics design.
Being noob myself I can't give you too many tips and tell in honesty they come from deep experience.
But I can give you one.
Don't be bent on doing everything yourself. Working with and understanding existing circuits is a huge opportunity to learn a lot from people who have infinitely more experience at this than you.
I have discovered this when I determined to fix couple of broken devices at home. Each time, by analyzing the existing circuit, I have learned a lot about how people put things together and how features of the device can realistically look.
With the benefit of hindsight, this should have been obvious. I am not spending too much time to read other peoples' codebases to learn from them but that's because I have started learning programming some 25 years ago and by now I can solve problems for myself. But when I started out I would take every opportunity to look at some foreign code, copy it, understand how it works and I understand this has been great learning tool.
Now that I have kids (older son is 7yo) I use the same technique to teach him programming. Instead of going from first principles I show him a working program (in scratch), or somebody else creating a working program or we create a working program with me programming it, and he learns much faster how to program by seeing how something works rather than by trying to derive from first principles.
Being noob myself I can't give you too many tips and tell in honesty they come from deep experience.
But I can give you one.
Don't be bent on doing everything yourself. Working with and understanding existing circuits is a huge opportunity to learn a lot from people who have infinitely more experience at this than you.
I have discovered this when I determined to fix couple of broken devices at home. Each time, by analyzing the existing circuit, I have learned a lot about how people put things together and how features of the device can realistically look.
With the benefit of hindsight, this should have been obvious. I am not spending too much time to read other peoples' codebases to learn from them but that's because I have started learning programming some 25 years ago and by now I can solve problems for myself. But when I started out I would take every opportunity to look at some foreign code, copy it, understand how it works and I understand this has been great learning tool.
Now that I have kids (older son is 7yo) I use the same technique to teach him programming. Instead of going from first principles I show him a working program (in scratch), or somebody else creating a working program or we create a working program with me programming it, and he learns much faster how to program by seeing how something works rather than by trying to derive from first principles.