[HN Gopher] Electronics Course (45 episodes, YouTube)
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Electronics Course (45 episodes, YouTube)
Author : childintime
Score : 122 points
Date : 2023-08-31 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| philipov wrote:
| I love finding full course lecture series like this, although I'm
| usually looking more for History or Political Science lectures
| these days.
| pizzaknife wrote:
| This is exactly what I need right now. I have a rudimentary
| understanding but I have a large project on the wipeboard which I
| don't yet have the knowledge to begin - this is the material i
| need. Thank you for sharing!
| hbrav wrote:
| What's the project?
| pizzaknife wrote:
| im admittedly embarrassed to mention it because I know its
| very rudimentary but here goes - small solar array //and// an
| exercise bike transformed into a generator - both going to
| same battery store - stretch goal: generation and draw
| telemetry dashboard. What will it power you might ask?
| automated garden system (water delivery essentially), a
| nintendo switch and accompanying TV/peripherals. "Why a
| stationary bike?" Make the kids work for video game time lmao
| - EDIT: my current electrical engineering experience is
| limited to RC and full sized vehicle troubleshooting, like an
| RC servo or a motorcycle's stator etc...
| sheepshear wrote:
| Not sure this YouTube series is the right fit for your
| project. Razavi's course is focused on signal processing
| (for future integrated circuit designers), whereas your
| project is power processing. Quite different approaches.
| The only comparable academic alternative that comes to mind
| is maybe CU Boulder on Coursera, which covers at least some
| of your project. I'm not conversant enough with hobbyist-
| oriented resources to make a more relevant suggestion.
|
| How deep do you want to go in terms of where to draw the
| line between building and buying parts?
| znpy wrote:
| An hour-long video on the PN junction... This is going to be
| good.
| whartung wrote:
| So, this course seems to be about going into the depth, I guess
| the chemistry and physics, of solid state electronics. Diodes,
| transistors, etc.
|
| But do I need to spend 45 hours watching this to empower me to
| successfully design, say, a microcomputer board? A Z80? 6502?
| Even an 8088? Do I need this level of depth to get a
| microcontroller to make a stepper motor do what I want to do
| (whatever that may be)? Or a power circuit to drive a higher
| power motor controller? (Do I need relays for that? Power
| transistors? Big capacitors?)
|
| Because that's what I think many who are interested in
| "electronics" want to do. Will the lack of understanding of a
| PN junction cause those kinds of projects to fail? Or be more
| difficult to do?
|
| For someone interested in these kinds of projects, is there a
| better place to put 45 hours of study? Perhaps just wiring
| stuff together, stamping out fires, and tracing down the smoky
| parts?
| joshvm wrote:
| I'd argue as a hobbyist you can get away with "block level"
| design - understand enough to know what you need, read
| datasheets and implement a reference design. For example
| making a stepper motor do what you want - probably not, just
| buy a driver board and look at example code and a reference
| circuit. Same goes for a high power motor: either you buy a
| pre-made board that has the right spec, or you look up a
| reference circuit with a common control IC. Most digital
| design can be done in this way; you need to know how to
| program as well.
|
| Analog is in some ways more complicated. But there are lots
| of reference designs for blocks like filters and amplifiers
| and you can look at the pros/cons of different circuits. A
| good companion to this sort of design work is Horowitz and
| Hill. Even high frequency board design can mostly be achieved
| around by following best practices unless you're doing
| stripline RF stuff.
|
| The difference lies in things like designing extremely
| efficient circuits (optimize for part number, cost, etc) and
| designing boards that can be certified. You can get away with
| a lot if you're not designing to a tight spec.
| epolanski wrote:
| 45 hours of watching is not the hard part, it is actually
| learning and understanding and exercising.
|
| I've followed few MIT courses (mostly on algebra, category
| theory and some more CS-related) and while a video took me 1
| hour, the actual amount of time around it (writing down the
| important things, summarizing, exercising, finding answers
| about the topics touched) was much more.
|
| Between twice and 4 times the amount.
|
| On that front in-person education has definitely two
| benefits: you have peers in your same situation with whom you
| can discuss the topics and obviously access to teachers and
| their assistants.
| znpy wrote:
| Sure you're right, go watch something else.
| chongli wrote:
| _Do I need this level of depth to get a microcontroller to
| make a stepper motor do what I want to do (whatever that may
| be)_
|
| Dave over at the EEVBlog likes to draw a distinction here. He
| distinguishes between people who want to learn electronics
| (build power supplies, radios), that is, analog circuits,
| from people who want put together Arduino projects. He refers
| to the latter as more of embedded programming rather than
| electronics.
|
| The linked course definitely leans way over to the side of
| the former. If you're more interested in the latter, there
| are tons of YouTube channels out there about building
| projects with the Arduino.
| peteforde wrote:
| Possibly OT and possibly triggering, but I had to stop
| watching Dave's videos because he matches my personal
| definition of giant gatekeeping asshole.
|
| I have learned a ton from him over the years, but when you
| watch something like his video about Flux, it's hard not to
| feel a little gross. This is subjective, but when you spend
| a lot of time making sweeping generalizations and then
| quite literally read the fawning comments as though an echo
| chamber proves your point... that's when I have to check
| out.
|
| https://youtu.be/x5Yslag6Mxk?si=FjL8lHjFhWtFsWun&t=45
|
| My bias is that I've been using Flux for about a year and
| while it's not without flaws... it's actually pretty great.
|
| TL;DR: dividing people who are building things with
| electronics into "real" vs "embedded" is just a way to
| enforce a very artificial hierarchy where you're
| conveniently always at the top.
| [deleted]
| chongli wrote:
| _artificial hierarchy_
|
| There is an artificial hierarchy here but it's not the
| one you're thinking of. It's a hierarchy of abstractions.
| At the lowest level of abstraction you're dealing with
| physics, Maxwell's equations, materials and their
| properties. Above that you have the lumped matter
| abstraction (conductors, resistors, capacitors,
| inductors, diodes, transistors). Above that you have
| modular circuit components, ICs, digital logic. Above
| that you have CPUs, instruction sets, assembly
| language... This abstraction continues all the way up
| through software engineering.
|
| The reason Dave makes this distinction is not because he
| wants to gatekeep. It's because he wants people to learn
| how to build their own circuits rather than combining
| modules built by others. This is no different from a
| programmer telling someone to learn a programming
| language to build their own software rather than using
| Microsoft Office etc.
|
| Dave does plenty of embedded programming himself. He uses
| Arduinos when the project calls for them. He just wants
| people to understand that there's a whole lot more to
| understand when you go to a lower level of abstraction
| (lumped matter components).
|
| I think it's also an important distinction to be made
| because a lot of businesses have sprung up within the
| Arduino ecosystem and it's brought a lot of new people
| into the electronics world. These folks are excited and
| enthusiastic but they often lack knowledge of electronics
| fundamentals and so they struggle to troubleshoot when
| things go wrong. It's important to help these people find
| the resources they need to learn electronics so they
| don't need to rely on others to troubleshoot their
| circuits.
| peteforde wrote:
| I respect your reply. What follows isn't arguing against
| what you said.
|
| I see a parallel between the Arduino/Adafruit folks and
| the people who go through developer bootcamps. It is
| extremely ill advised to make sweeping statements about
| bootcamp grads which might imply a shallow depth of
| understanding or troubleshooting capacity, because so
| many people will get very upset about your gatekeeping.
| That vibe hasn't made its way to the EE world, clearly.
|
| I've had a 35 year and counting career as a self-taught
| software developer. I've learned a lot about adjacent
| concepts without needing to become particularly expert in
| any of them, because I learned early to delegate to
| others' strengths. For example, I've never learned
| assembly or been unable to function because I couldn't
| implement a device driver. I also have very weak math
| skills in general.
|
| All of which brings me to the actually important
| question: what knowledge or skills do you _need_ to do
| what you have set out to do? An honest evaluation of most
| problems can only result in "not that much, actually"
| because you are not working in a vacuum. We have YouTube
| and GPT. We make friends with complimentary skills, and
| we develop a sense of when to persist vs when to ask for
| help.
|
| I don't subscribe to the idea that someone who has
| internalized all of the formulas is somehow more pure,
| any more than I assign respect to someone who still
| memorizes all of their friends' phone numbers.
|
| In many/most cases, not knowing which topics we should
| obtain deep knowledge of is actually a negative. While
| it's perfectly reasonable to decide that you want to know
| all about Maxwell's equations, but you should see it for
| what it is: a hobby, unless you have a damn good reason
| to prioritize it over something silly like shipping your
| project.
|
| It's like the DIY keyboard community, I guess: it's cool
| that folks want to get that nerdy about building their
| own data input device... but if you stop to build your
| idea of the perfect keyboard before starting the task
| assigned to you, you deserve to be given a strike.
|
| TL;DR: 98% of people with a deliverable in mind would be
| better suited by a Collin's Lab video than a 45 minute
| lecture on the physics that make capacitors work.
| chongli wrote:
| One of the biggest challenges with electronics is that
| the abstractions are leaky. We see this as well sometimes
| in software. You may be writing a project in C++ and you
| keep getting segmentation faults and other memory errors,
| so you need to know something about assembly language and
| the computer's memory architecture if you want to be most
| effective at troubleshooting these issues.
|
| At another level of abstraction, say Python programming,
| you're much less likely to have to deal with this issue
| because memory is managed for you. You can get a lot done
| with Python without ever needing to know anything about
| the lower levels. Python is a much more solid abstraction
| than C++, which is leaky.
|
| Electronics is even worse than C++. All of the rules and
| formulas with lumped matter abstractions change when you
| move into the realm of high frequency signals. A circuit
| you build to operate at low frequency may fail utterly at
| high frequency due to transmission line effects. The
| Arduino/Adafruit communities try to get around these
| issues by largely operating at low speeds and confining
| much of the high speed stuff (radios) to built-in modem
| circuits and antennas.
|
| But even at low speeds, you still have issues with things
| like impedance, current, etc. Beginners hoping to run an
| electric motor on the IO pins of their Arduino are going
| to be confused and frustrated when it doesn't work. Not
| only that, but experimentation in electronics can result
| in electric shocks and even fires if users don't know
| what they're doing. This is one area where software has a
| big advantage: it's pretty hard to do physical damage to
| your property (or your health) with a Python script.
| [deleted]
| mcshicks wrote:
| It's interesting that he started with that topic. As opposed to
| voltage, current , RC circuits, etc. He's got quite a few
| topics, like emitter followers and op amps. But I think he's a
| bit below the level of what people need in order to create
| useful PCB level electronics. I think something like this would
| be so much more useful if it was tied to an existing book on
| the subject, like for instance "The Art of Electronics". Which
| actually doesn't cover device physics but start with just
| transistor and diode models presented as facts.
| znpy wrote:
| It makes perfect sense to me, as this looks more like an
| university-level course rather than a tutorial.
|
| In my university there were two main course around
| electronics (past the electromagnetism part pf the physics
| course) circuit theory (all things voltages, currents,
| various laws like thevenin, transformations, capacitors,
| resistors, inductances and ideal diodes) and then there was
| the electronic course (all things transistor, basic signal
| analysis etc). My university was a proper (and major)
| engineering-centered university though.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| This seems more like a quarter of Sedra/Smith[1]---which, at
| over 1200 pages, could very well be three courses---and half
| of an electronic materials/semiconductors course.
|
| [1] https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/microelectronic-
| circuits...
|
| When I did a Sedra/Smith course, it was after two semesters
| of passive linear circuit analysis, so it makes sense to skip
| the basics in lecture 1.
|
| -----
|
| Personally, I found 6.002 (MIT's Circuits lecture[2]) very
| good for getting through electricity basics and into
| amplifier modelling, and then using Falstad's simulator to
| explore real amplifiers and diode circuits. I wish the
| lecture audio was better, because at one point he moves from
| the I-V bend of a crude amplifier into the linear region (by
| applying a bias voltage and shrinking the signal input) while
| playing music[3], and that sounds really cool live.
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9F74AFA03AA06A11
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/JqvKtMNz3RQ?t=1480
|
| It's old content, so 240p. At one point, they had better
| lecture videos from a more recent year, but those are maybe
| on edX or MIT DSpace or their Digital Learning server.
| analognoise wrote:
| Then I'd need to watch three hours of videos to refresh the
| bits of rusty calculus. At least.
| [deleted]
| hbrav wrote:
| This is the sort of thing that is solid gold for a well-motivated
| hobbyist. Lots of content together in one place that takes a (I
| hope) coherent journey through the "what's important" of a
| subject.
|
| If anyone knows of something similar for mechanical engineering I
| would be very interested. (Thanks in advance from a physicist who
| should probably have been an engineer instead :-) )
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm a chemist who should've went for Informatica (computer
| science) or Ingegneria Informatica (computer engineering) too,
| I can relate.
|
| While I don't think that a degree would've added much to my
| professional life as I learned what I wanted/needed I can't but
| say that chemistry gave me even less (aside of being generally
| good at theoretical and practical sciences).
| spacemadness wrote:
| A well-motivated hobbyist with a physics degree maybe. As
| someone who studied EE, I wouldn't recommend most hobbyists sit
| through all this unless they have a solid background in basic
| engineering math. He assumes some knowledge of the Laplace
| transformation for instance. Really, you don't need to know
| this stuff to do hobby electronics. You can get pretty far in
| thinking about circuits at a higher level. Of course, if you
| want to build your own amplifiers and know exactly what's going
| on everywhere you will need sit down and learn and get a more
| in-depth foundational understanding.
| fumoto wrote:
| What do you recommended for non-EE major hobbyist?
| spacemadness wrote:
| I think answering that depends on ones goals and current
| level of understanding. Some others in the other thread did
| a good job pointing in the right direction. Whatever gets
| you away from just watching Youtube and actually building
| basic circuits. Adafruit has some good starting points, or
| used to. If you can hook up an op-amp IC and get it to
| amplify a signal and why that works intuitively you will
| have gotten pretty far. Really, the intuition comes from
| understanding what frequencies capacitors and inductors
| help and hinder, and what happens to components in parallel
| and in series. Build a radio kits used to be pretty awesome
| for this.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| This reminds me, off topic but I once found a YouTube channel or
| playlist of this African women teaching how to read. Apparently a
| lot of African women can't read and she wanted to solve the
| problem by making a video course to teach them. I can't for the
| life of me find it, when I search its either kids ABCs videos or
| TED talks about empowered black woman authors. I wonder if any
| video course aficionados might know what channel I'm talking
| about.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Is it this channel?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@adultliteracyandenglishlang
|
| Here is the reading/writing playlist:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9RaD1SLwSoZhMNz7pqRw...
|
| I like her pacing (not fast, not too slow) and the way she
| presents herself. It seems like a high quality course, even if
| the audio and video quality are not perfect. I wonder how we
| could bring more awareness to this great work and others like
| it.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| No, the one I was looking for was a west African woman in
| Africa, teaching people to learn to read English from
| scratch.
| jcutrell wrote:
| It's so disheartening that you can have this much of a
| laser focused understanding of what you're looking for and
| not be able to find it.
| elkos wrote:
| I have the gut feeling that a while back you could find
| it with a Google search. Nowadays I don't think I can
| find such stuff.
| news_hacker wrote:
| Wonder if they could use Google Takeout [1] to export all
| their YouTube data, and then try to search through the
| history data.
|
| [1] https://takeout.google.com/
| sourcepluck wrote:
| https://invidious.flokinet.to/playlist?list=PL7qUW0KPfsIIOPO...
|
| Here's the same course, but on invidious, for those who don't go
| onto Youtube "proper".
|
| Is there a HN policy on this? Seems more "neutral" to post the
| non-youtube link to me. There are people who don't go on to
| youtube, whereas I don't know of anyone with a moral issue with
| invidious?
|
| Anyway, course looks cool, I'm bookmarking for after doing a few
| more practical fun things first to build motivation. Cheers.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I'd bookmark the Youtube link though, I expect them to stick
| around for longer.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I always prefer to have plain YouTube links, because then my
| LibRedirect extension for Firefox redirects me to my self-
| hosted Invidious instance, or another one of my choice. If
| someone posts a link to a specific Invidious instance, the
| extension can't detect it to redirect me to my own.
| helmette wrote:
| thanks
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