Starting out in electronics, what do I need?

[ProjectParticipant 507]

Good evening.

I am trying to get into electronics and trying to find information when it comes to that. What kind of equipment do I need? Where should I start? Any safety tips?

I, Thank you in advance

Best Regards
Project-Genesis

[Anonymous 7]

Project wrote:

I am trying to get into electronics

What kind of electronics?

[WPLParticipant 2390]

Grue is right — it depends on what you intend to focus on, but as a general guide I’d suggest:
a.) solderless breadboard and good quality jumper wires for same
b.) basic power supply (variable is best, though you can do quite a bit with a fixed 5-volt wall-wart to get started).
c.) digital multimeter. Does not have to be too fancy or expensive, but avoid the $5 junk ones. You’ll need to check voltages, current, and resistances.
d.) an assortment of components. Resistors, capacitors, etc. Your exact focus will determine what you need. If you intend to get into, say, microcontrollers or digital circuits, you won’t need as big a range of components as if you’re intending to learn analog design. Most integrated circuits (“chips”) are now surface-mount, so they won’t just plug into a breadboard — but you can get adapter boards inexpensively
e.) soldering iron — ideally a temperature-controlled one.
f.) solder (personally, I don’t like lead-free solder; I still use 63/37 tin/lead)
g.) basic desoldering tools (can be as simple as solder wick)
h.) a good desk lamp and possibly a magnifier (I rarely use a magnifier, but I’m nearsighted anyway).

If you explain your goals a bit more, we can provide more specific suggestions. Feel free to ask me anything you want to know as you get deeper into the field — electronics design is how I make my living.

[Anonymous 3]

Hi, glad to help you.

Safety first: use low voltage of less than 12 volts (either respect to the ground or floating) and low power (less than 1 amper) for begin, that cannot do much harm even if you touch the wire. (Do not build a tesla coil or high voltage stuff initially, that takes lot of safety experience)

You need a power supply that is ground-independent and low voltage and not much current to begin with. A phone charger will do and cannot do much harm. Later on an atx PC power supply with green and black wire shorted (to start) will be more than enough, but know what you are doing, and it is also grounded, keep that in mind when connecting multiple devices. For analog electronics you need to filter that, RC filter and some 78xx series regulators will do.

You need an oscilloscope beside multimeters. PC sound card will be okay for slow signals, but you can buy a 10 MHz analog cathode-ray scope for 100$ or less (I still have it since 2005) and that will really get you started. Seeing a signal in time is a lot more info than a multimeter can give.

Yes, soldering iron is a must, use something with temperature control. do not burn chips and the copper down of boards. yes, lead-free solder is not easy to use, and I don’t use it for hobby stuff. Desolder: there is a copper desoldering wire soaked with flux, and sucks away the solder. Or soak a wire with flux, mediocre but useful results.

And last but not least, look up the topic of ground loops and decoupling (electromagnetic compatibility or EMC) , it can give nightmares to the noobs. Remember, even digital circuits have analog aspects.

I suggest ElectroDroid phone app for useful info, data sheet catalog websites of the internet (or download from local electronics distributor site)

For start, as a poor student, I disassembled old discarded boards from TV sets, and whatever electric stuff thrown away at dumpsters. Sometimes I found still good power mosfets that cost three dollars per piece, or three bottles of beer at local prices. Have a look at this, at least blowing up “free found” parts wont hurt that much your budget. Just do not connect electolyte capacitors reverse polarity, they will be very loud and stinky 🙂

[rightturnclydeParticipant 705]

If your doing this for a hobby an Arduino is an easy way to build some great projects at a reasonable cost. Although you will learn more about electronics going the route of the previous posters an Arduino allows you to put together sophisticated circuits quickly and without years of experience. It is more reliant on coding than actual electronic knowledge but once you get going you can’t help but get involved with basic electronic principles.

[AttonParticipant]

Go download this https://yenka.com/ then try it out a bit. It costs nothing and its a great way to learn before buying stuff. You can follow tutorials and implement the ideas you learn for literally nothing.

A MGTOW is a man who is not a woman's bitch!

[Old BuckParticipant 3596]

I also encourage the use of an Arduino. There is a lot of resources available on projects. As you build you learn how the components work.

Don't chase tail. Turn yours around, walk away, and live free!

[WPLParticipant 2390]

Arduino is a good choice, largely because of the huge wealth of libraries available to interface with almost any other hardware you could want to use and a big community of other users for support. Cost is no longer much of an issue because inexpensive clone boards are available. If you’re thinking about getting into the embedded world, it’s probably the best option out there right now. If Arduino had existed when I got started, I’d certainly have begun there (Basic Stamps did exist, but at $50 a pop for a BS2 they were fun to play with but not very affordable — and they were SLOW)… so I bit the proverbial bullet, got a device programmer, some PICs, and trudged through Microchip assembly language, later adding a freeware compiler — those were the “bad old days”. To a large extent, once you learn the basics of hardware and programming on one platform, those skills are transferable to other platforms (I have my favorite microcontrollers for personal projects, but at work I don’t usually get to pick the uC and worse, it’s usually running buggy code developed years ago by someone else).

Also, I recommend picking up any of the books by Forrest M. Mims III. They used to be available in the US at Radio Shack stores (maybe still are — no RS stores left near me). Not real heavy on theory, but many useful circuits. Later, a copy of “The Art of Electronics” by Horowitz and Hill might be worth buying. Of course, there are endless tutorials online (videos and written) too, but sometimes (especially in videos) people either provide incorrect information or they don’t actually provide enough information to really follow what they’re doing.

Old Buck wrote:

I also encourage the use of an Arduino. There is a lot of resources available on projects. As you build you learn how the components work.

[SolidParticipant 7520]

Before everything, I don’t work with electronics, my view on the subject is only as a hobbyist.

I started with the Arduino, and if you know about electronics, is fine, if you don’t, you will end up like me, a guy who just didn’t have an idea why he should put an resistor before a button in a circuit. I started with it because I had a background in computer programming and it back them looked like the easier way to start.

You guys gave really good advices, but I felt that not having an background in electronics turned me into one of those “just buy a shield for that” kind of guy. Arduino for sure is brilliant, is fun and you can build nice electronics with it, but is good for an initial taste of what electronics is.

About Arduino, there are several chips, what you will usually see online and in the tutorials, are development boards, for production, or for your final circuit, I recommend not using them, since they use a lot of space, and costs far more than the chip alone with a power supply.

Another good chip, are the ESP families, they have embedded wifi, sometimes bluetooth, they are far faster than arduinos in general, and have far more memory. They are the between of an arduino and a raspberry pi. Those chips can be programmed with Lua/Javascript, if you don’t really like C/C++, you can go with them.

You can just buy an arduino, some sensors (temperature and humidity for example), an ethernet shield for connectivity, plug everything together as it were a lego, upload some code and it’s done. You won’t even need to know Ohm’s law to make it work, won’t need a soldering iron, protoboard nor a multimeter. And you will have a temperature/humidity “IoT” device.

Sounds simple, but remember that there is a lot of theory behind that, and this model abstracts you from that reality so you will be turned just into a guy who buy shields and boards. The Art of Electronics is an incredible book, and is available for free here if you want

https://archive.org/details/TheArtOfElectronics-2ndEdition

Is an old edition, but worth reading ! Our brothers here know far more electronics that I will ever know, but I’m giving my point of view of what is getting into electronics, only with arduino and not knowing the real science behind that, is fun, but you are not getting the real taste of what electronics is.

About safety, our brothers already stated several good points, another point are protection glasses, because sometimes you are just like me, like to see what happens when something goes wrong, and you won’t want to get a capacitor exploding and getting into your eyes. Also, the fumes in the soldering/desoldering process are toxic, you can build a small filter, I use a cooler/fan with a small filter in the front of it to capture these fumes.

The most cost effective solution in a short time, would be study electronics from the books, and use simulators to test analog circuits. Once you “tamed” them, you will know what kind of parts you will need to buy to build what you want. I usually buy things in large amounts to save money, capacitors, leds, resistors, wires, buttons, button caps, etc… Other components are more expensive, so is better to buy only what you will need.

Another division on components, are the THT vs SMD, THT are those with “legs”, and SMD are those soldered in the surface of your board. One mistake that I made was to buy too much TH components, and now I don’t even use them except for prototyping. So think a lot before buying those stuff, there is no wrong choice if you are doing this for a hobby, but once you changed your mind, you will have to buy a lot of components again.

If you want to practice SMD soldering, I recommend this board

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SMT-SMD-Component-Welding-Practice-Blue-PCB-Board-Soldering-Solder-DIY-Suite-Kit-/332101654952?hash=item4d52cd19a8:g:KhEAAOSw4DJYhylA

It costs 1 dollar, comes with all components, you just need a soldering iron, and as said by other brothers here, use one that you can regulate the temperature. SMD components are more exposed to the iron and you will destroy some of them in the process of soldering if you don’t take care of that.

SMD soldering is one of the most relaxing things that I ever done. Watch this video:

Youtube is also a great place for learning electronics nowadays. GreatScott is a guy who have a lot of videos in the subject.

Summarizing everything, if I started today again

– Start by theory, reading some books and practicing analog electronics on simulators
– After that I would start experimenting on the real world and buy some equipment (Soldering iron, protoboard, multimeter, etc…)
– Only after that, I would get into arduino’n stuff. Supposing that you don’t have any previous knowledge in programming, so you will have only to learn one thing at a time.
– Put everything together and start making awesome things as a hobbyist !

[Anonymous 3]

Start with analog stuff first, not with complex stuff like an Arduino. I suggest making transistor amplifier experiments, driving some speakers with a sound signal and a voltage follower, maybe try then operational amplifiers (like LM324, that works without a negative voltage supply too, 4 opamp in 1 chip.) and basic digital logic ICs. Like 74HCT14 and other logic stuff. There are a lot of analog aspects of that. And build some SMPS (switch mode powes supply) stuff, also a lot of learning. After this you may be ready for digital stuff. Let’s hope it’s documented and there is a free method to program the stuff from the computer. This stuff gets very complex. The more stuff is integrated to one chip, the more stupid it can get.

[sidecarParticipant 35837]

WPL wrote:

“The Art of Electronics”

Solid wrote:

The Art of Electronics is an incredible book,

I opened this thread specifically to recommend the AoE. Glad to see others did the same.

Anonymous wrote:

Start with analog stuff first,

This as well. Digital devices live in an analog world, and far too many who concentrate solely on the digital end get screwed by analog realities.

[Author]

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