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Make: Electronics (Learning by Discovery)

Charles Platt · 8 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Make: Electronics (Learning by Discovery)" by Charles Platt.
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Amazon Summary
"This is teaching at its best!" --Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 timer (the world's most successful integrated circuit), and author of Much Ado About Almost Nothing: Man's Encounter with the Electron (Booklocker.com) "A fabulous book: well written, well paced, fun, and informative. I also love the sense of humor. It's very good at disarming the fear. And it's gorgeous. I'll be recommending this book highly." --Tom Igoe, author of Physical Computing and Making Things Talk Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun, hands-on way? With Make: Electronics, you'll start working on real projects as soon as you crack open the book. Explore all of the key components and essential principles through a series of fascinating experiments. You'll build the circuits first, then learn the theory behind them! Build working devices, from simple to complex You'll start with the basics and then move on to more complicated projects. Go from switching circuits to integrated circuits, and from simple alarms to programmable microcontrollers. Step-by-step instructions and more than 500 full-color photographs and illustrations will help you use -- and understand -- electronics concepts and techniques. Discover by breaking things: experiment with components and learn from failure Set up a tricked-out project space: make a work area at home, equipped with the tools and parts you'll need Learn about key electronic components and their functions within a circuit Create an intrusion alarm, holiday lights, wearable electronic jewelry, audio processors, a reflex tester, and a combination lock Build an autonomous robot cart that can sense its environment and avoid obstacles Get clear, easy-to-understand explanations of what you're doing and why
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
You probably want something that gets you started with some hands-on projects, actually building stuff and seeing results. I'd recommend something like the following, and ignore anybody who says "Start with The Art of Electronics" or similar. Not that The Art of Electronics isn't something you might want to get around to eventually. But it's good to get your hands dirty and start building stuff, blinking LED's, etc., early on IMO.

https://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pl...

https://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Journey-Amplifiers-R...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1680453742/

When you're ready for more of a "textbook" instead of the hands-on stuff, consider the aforementioned The Art of Electronics and/or

https://www.amazon.com/Grobs-Basic-Electronics-Fundamentals-...

awillen
I just bought that first book. I have a little free time in the foreseeable future, and this seems like a useful thing to learn about. Thanks!
duxup
Thank you.

Those books look right up my alley/ a good starting point.

dole
Also worth checking out on Amazon, search for Arduino or Raspberry Pi Starter Kit (Elegoo’s a popular brand), and look for the ones with a breadboard and decent mix of components. My old kit came with a disc but I assume most now have downloadable tutorials in PDF of how do to simple projects such as a light meter with output to LEDs, or input using a 4-way joystick.
Sep 12, 2016 · davexunit on Against Minimalism
I got one of those Arduino starter kits that comes with a bunch of jumper wires, LEDs, resistors, push buttons, etc. (there's tons of kits, check adafruit.com for some) and learned enough to make an LED blink and went from there. Arduino makes it easy to get your feet wet and you can get more sophisticated once you're comfortable with the basics. Being a software person, the next step I took was ditching the Arduino IDE and writing my firmware in C using avr-gcc to compiler and avrdude to flash. I have an interest in custom USB input devices (game controllers and keyboards) so I've also starting using the LUFA[0] library which is very satisfying once you get it to work (pressing a push button on a breadboard and seeing a character typed on your computer for the first time is great!) So far I've focused on digital circuits, but I'd like to make an amplifier or something to learn more about analog circuitry. As you can see, I'm not too far past the starting line but I feel like I've learned a lot thus far. It's definitely a satisfying hobby.

I'm still in search of good textbooks on the topic (SICP is to CS as ____ is to EE? Recommendations anyone?) but I've gotten some value out of "Make: Electronics"[1] as a non-academic, beginners guide.

I hope this helps!

[0] http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pl...

lloyd-christmas
Thanks a bunch, that's very helpful.
It's not hard to get started. Pick up Make: Electronics to learn the basics by example. Each chapter walks you through a project that teaches some important concepts. http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

And to get started with Arduino, you can simply buy a starter kit: http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Starter-Official-170-page-Proj...

I actually think it's easier for most people to get started with electronics than with code. This is coming from someone with 13 years coding experience and who has only been working on hobby electronics for the past 2 years.

Electronics projects don't have the same amount of boilerplate you see with writing code today. Development tools, frameworks, dependency management, the commandline, polyglot projects etc hinder a lot of beginners at the start. I would say you need to read 900 pages before you can fully understand everything that goes into developing a trivial CRUD website. With electronics, you just plug in and start learning. Learn the functions of a lot of different components and then come up with something that uses them together. Ohm's law is most of what you /need/ to know to design a basic circuit. You can derive what you need with the help of V=IR e.g. voltage dividers, components in series, parallel. And you need to learn how to read schematics and datasheets.

The theory behind everything you do is deep if you want to venture into electromagnetism, which is IMO deeper than what you would expect from college level CS. But it's not necessary to have a deep understanding of it in practice. Though you could say the same about a lot of software engineering and its relation to CS. :)

minthd
I think it's easy to start in (some) software, if you pick the right tools. For example, micrososft lightswitch is great for beginners who want to build a CRUD website.The only problem - it's expensive.

Simlarly, nutonian/big-ml is great for machine learning, and gamemaker or ms-spark are great for games, and for websites there are many tools ,be it CMS's or others that help.

But i agree , general website design is far too complex.

codesushi42
BTW if you are interested in learning some of the theory, check out Practical Electronics for Inventors:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Paul-S...

A good book:

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

maho
I highly recommend this book. The first practical lesson, as I recall, has you short-circuit a battery and destroy an LED. It's great to learn the limits of typical components this way, and it takes away the fear of breaking stuff. It's written simple enough to be followed by a child, but I had a blast going through it as a physics grad student who knew electrodynamics and very little electronics.

The first two editions had quite a few errata, but there is an online page for them:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9780596153748...

dguaraglia
I've been following this course (to refresh my informal knowledge of electronics, which I haven't touched since I discovered it was way cheaper to write broken code than build a broken circuit back in my teens) and it's pretty good. I like how they mix the theory with practical experiments showing it in practice.

I don't recommend the Kindle version though, the formatting is really lacking.

arc_of_descent
Thanks for the recommendation. I just purchased the Kindle version. I'm not really an electronics guy, but have always been interested in how it works. Will do by best to put this book to use!
increment_i
I recently purchased this book, along with three different kits that supplied all the tools and components I would need to carry out the experiments for roughly the first two thirds of the book (total cost: around 300 dollars, I know I could have gotten most of this stuff cheaper but such is life). My experience was...mixed. The book did a great job explaining some of the basic principles of electronics but these kind of cookbook tutorials don't seem to work as well as say a book that will teach you everything you need to know about Ruby programming. Eventually you will need to start from hard theoretic principles in order to design your own circuits.

I've come to the realization that you need to pull from a bunch of different sources to get a good enough background in the domain of electrons to start building a project you want to see realized, and that mastery in this domain is probably a journey that can be measured in decades.

For anybody interested in learning electronics and hardware design, I suggest this book: http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

It really helped me to get into hardware in a structured and clear way.

A must read.

mwoodworth
a little more on the analog design end, but I like:

The Art of Electronics by Horowitz & Hill

Integrated Electronics by Millman and Halkias (There was allegedly a newer edition published in 2001)

Electrical Engineering 101: Everything You Should Have Learned in School... but Probably Didn’t by Darren Ashby

Microelectronic Circuits by Sedra & Smith (Look around for a 4th edition)

evck
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz & Hill gets my vote. A bit outdated, but the fundamentals don't change. Third edition is vapourware, but expected out late 2013.
vonmoltke
I second all of the above. The Art of Electronics was my first non-required textbook purchase, and the 4th edition of Microelectronic Circuits was my textbook for two semesters of electronics and came in handy for multiple other classes.

To that list I would add the student manual that goes along with The Art of Electronics, as well as the Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits series from McGraw-Hill. Both those choices are more on the practical side of circuit construction. The Encyclopedia in particular has an abundance of circuit designs with varying levels of explanation that make good starting points for learning about or experimenting with particular circuit functions.

It looks like a nice 32bit ARM microcontroller, so its great for small projects like talking to sensors, running servos & motors, etc. Compared to other microcontroller platforms like Arduino, this Stellaris chip is much more powerful (32bit vs. 8bit, 80mhz vs. ~16mhz, floating point support, etc.) so perhaps it can even run an embedded linux operating system like the Beagleboard, Rasberry Pi, etc.

If you just want to make an LED flash and play with a couple buttons you don't need anything else--the development board includes everything to hook it up to a computer and program it using Stellaris' software: http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/microcontroller/arm_stellaris/code...

If you're totally new to electronics and microcontrollers, Make magazine has a good book to check out: http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

hatcravat
Are there embedded linux distributions that work without a memory management unit? I ask is because it looks like the Stellaris doesn't have one. The Memory Protection Unit allows the OS/monitor/etc. to limit access to specified regions from unprivileged processes, but it does not appear to have any sort of remapping facility.
Joeboy
Apparently you can configure a vanilla linux kernel for mmu-less systems - http://opensrc.sec.samsung.com/
mvts
Great, thank you for taking the time to write this.
pietrofmaggi
This Microcontroller has 256KB FLASH and 32KB RAM, and no external bus... no-way you can run linux on it.

Better use a real-time scheduler like TNKernel[1] or FreeRTOS[2]. BTW FreeRTOS commercial version is included in ROM on some TI Cortex-M MCU.

[1] http://tnkernel.com/ [2] http://www.freertos.org/

This isn't exactly what you've requested, but it's still a very good basic electronics guide -

Make: Electronics http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

Part of the book is breaking things to see how they work which is much cooler than thinking of things as a black box.

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