wmeitzler

This sounds like Fountaindale Library in Bolingbrook. I lived there myself for 2 years, it's a great up-and-coming town, and the library is truly spectacular.

Another complex question asked in good faith: Nothing has been done? Nothing? This seems like an overtly emotional value statement to the global response to a complex problem-- our industrial activities have side effects that effect our environment. The challenge is, what can we do about it, and what has worked so far?

Can we explore this issue from a not-panicked perspective? Off the top of my head (feel free to hit me with Cunningham's Law):

- Aerosol CFC's were a problem we addressed

- Leaded paint and gasoline were another example

- There is a dramatic increase in interest in electrification, which seems to be spearheaded by the environmentalist movement

- I see more discussion about E-waste now than I did 10 years ago. Right to repair seems to be gaining speed in the Reduce/Repair side of the 3 R's

- Are we seeing increased efficiencies in extracting fossil fuels? Fracking seems to fit that niche

"Nothing was done" seems to be a value statement. If we are to agree on progress, we have to agree on who we are serving. Nether Molech (Unbounded consumption at the expense of the human) nor Malthus (Humans are an evil virus) strike me as great options.

Having been down this road, I strongly recommend you lock down your requirements before drowning in the sea of transport options. There are a lot of offerings out there that, from the device perspective, basically amount to a reinvention of HTTP(S). Many of these systems exist with the intent to retain the underlying TCP (really, the expensive-to-establish TLS) stream, which is not as much of a concern after HTTP 1.2 retained existing connections.

What are your latency requirements for RS232 to DOM paint? Are you storing time-series data, or just the last value? How fast does the data change, or, when do you want to be notified? Do you have circumstances that periodically disconnect your device from the Internet? It doesn't sound like you have a constrained environment i.e. a cellular connection or battery budget. It also sounds like this is a small-volume project, that you are not building the next Twitter.

If you are interested in historical data, do not overlook the value of generating a larger file on-edge, compressing it, and sending it with a boring-ass HTTP POST. If you want "fast", just set a trigger (i.e. the scale changed by more than 3 ounces in 1 second) to send a small update POST. Periodically perform a GET for config updates, and you're off to the races.

Keeping your messaging layer stone-cold boring enables you to use whatever whiz-bang backend you want, and leverage existing knowledge and tools of the HTTP world. Or just slap it in a database. If you're interested in time series, check out Timescale for Postgres.

I first ran across Forth here https://jeelabs.org/article/1651c/ early in my career. Fascinating language.

I hear you. I took many electronics classes over the years and never seemed to be able to build much intuition. I've often joked that 80% of my engineering training came from YouTube, and it seems to line up.

I found Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer project incredibly helpful in grokking both low-level computers and the electronic theory. https://eater.net/

I also highly recommend the channels bigclive, ave, eebvlog, Louis Rossman, and electroboom.

For podcasts, I've found The Amp Hour and Embedded.fm to be invaluable. There's also Contextual Electronics if you want a more Udemy-style experience.

As a fun toy, I recently picked up Upperstory's Spintronics (https://upperstory.com/spintronics/), which provides an excellent way to grok oscillators and transistors mechanically. You might do well to start there.

The best training I got, though, was sitting next to an EE as he troubleshot hos own designs. Anything you can do to get that experience - meetups, conferences, HAM events, etc. is absolute gold.

Best of luck in your adventures pushing electrons around!

I wish. It's everywhere. When I went phone shopping this year, my criteria was 1: not a phablet 2: Headphone jack 3: No notch. My options in the $500+ market* were... the Galaxy S9. And it's likely the S10 will be swapping its headphone jack for a cutout notch.

*$500 for a phone is suddenly midrange- let's not forget phone prices shot up 25% on average in the last 2 years, likely because other manufacturers realized Apple could get away charging $1000 for a phone and followed along.

You might appreciate a deep dive approach. Rheingoldheavy did a tremendous exploration into the underlying circuitry of an Arduino Uno [1]

I would also check out Chris Gammel's Contextual Electronics [2] as a semi-formal training course. It's also an opportunity to make connections with other EE's you can ping when you get "stuck"

Finally, invest in your tools! Get yourself a decent multimeter- if you aren't sure where to start, Dave Jones' EEVBlog [3] will provide more commentary than you expected. Having a good oscilloscope and logic analyzer also makes worlds of difference when you're troubleshooting a circuit. Digilent's Analog Discovery 2 [4] is a great get-you-started instrument.

[1]: https://rheingoldheavy.com/build-an-arduino-uno-from-scratch...

[2]: https://contextualelectronics.com/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdGQEVdxmQQ&t=414s

[4]: https://store.digilentinc.com/analog-discovery-2-100msps-usb...