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- Welcome to our two guest hosts!
- Michael from Programming Electronics Academy (formerly Open Source Hardware Group)
- Dan from Rheingold Heavy (he set up a special page for listeners of The Amp Hour)
- Podcasts!
- Michael used to run the OSHWG podcast.
- Dan was also on Embedded.fm in the past.
- Dan started wanting to make boards that have sensors underwater… now there is the OpenROV community!
- Chris mentioned a /r/bestof post about life before internet and how things were different.
- Michael recommends only “Kind of knowing something”, because it forces people to be comfortable with discomfort.
- Dan has been working on “Arduino From Scratch” posts, spec’ing cap for output and wondering about the ESR of capacitors (Chris had no idea)
- Mentors are critical for learning electronics.
- Niche communities like /r/arduino and various stack exchange sites are great resources. Forums can be dicey (especially if you ask rookie questions without searching first…) but are a great localization of experts.
- Thinking about getting started tomorrow for the first time? Michael recommends starting with a soldering kit.
- The recently announced ($5) Raspberry Pi Zero kit will bring in new people to the hobby/field.
Thanks to Dan and Michael for joining Chris on the show this week! Follow @RheingoldHeavy and @ProgElecAcademy on twitter for more!
Thanks to Lucas Santana for the picture of the (intact) elephant
“I have to learn everything first before I can do anything” pretty much sums up my main problem. I do electronics design for a day job where someone else is paying me to be focused, but when I’m trying to do hobby stuff at home, or maybe just figure out how some circuit works I often go off in the weeds and before I know it I’m off trying to relearn Maxwell’s equations or BJT device physics and nothing ever actually gets done.
You are not alone…
Its horses for courses, An interesting triple view point of educational electronics. Maybe in creasing the bit rate from byte to word may help : ) or choose a smaller elephant.
lay off the soldersmoke mannerisms chris, they’re generally frowned upon by real homebrews. ha, j/k of course. great show! the three of you have an interesting dynamic. thanks for sharing!
Been listening to the show for a few years, I have a to and from commute time to work of about 3 hours. I starting from episode 1 and to get to current didn’t take much time. I am an amateur electronics hobbyist and take the Contextual Electronics course(when I have time) and this episode gave me a few more outlets to learn. I agree with DUTCHQRP, you three have a great dynamic. Just wish Dave was in on it. Keep up the good work guys!
IMO frankenstein Electronics is the way 2 go. the key is the Art of drawing schematic diagrams. the Circuit. -copying schematic diagrams adding to schematic diagrams = frankenstein Electronics
IMO software is like loops , values & addresses. – go fetch add value then poke it here, then next in the stack. as in a stack paper. -so if your dream robot is a data log-ing crustacean. try to start out with a $5 solar garden light then make/mod it to power a sensor. -then add a RF link back to the house, from your garden. next add your own logging software. -many ants can down an elephant. & over time eat an elephant. 🙂
Thoroughly enjoyed this episode!
I think I should drop a warning and acknowledgement that the first third…make that ’til the last :30 of the 1:21:09 show is genuinely as anodyne as the notion of eating an elephant (as opposed to being busy cooking it, though they’re bushmeat and 4 mourning bulls didn’t come to be a part of the trouble.) Didn’t need help with that; hearing about Arduino (and bar mechanics…as in pub…) as a step-off of an A53 and that eutectic alloys still seem to have lead was enough of a downer. Nice timing of the Foxconn job joke. Somewhere there are 13yo trying to do projects by reading AllWinner partner docs in Chinese trying to flip that first bit; and cut the mess of discrete regulators and isolators on the desk; and drown things in flux without drowning too many things in flux and installing multiple fume hoods, right?
>Do you care about electrons and holes? [To get through college math.]
‘All ‘trons matter’ -is- a movie line, yeah. Carrier density more like…so no full projects done with graphite-filled thermoset plastic then?
>LTSpice/KiCAD
No, no, R. And your inverted classroom seems a bit quiet on new work (I mean, if you’re new, you may as well pick up something with some chew from research.)
>Wikipedia hole.
But now you can even get the editorial bit of Science and Nature issues on electron devices online (without throwing down $400 for the lot of subscription memberships,) that makes for some excellent sidebar builds of the topics.
http://www.lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt “Do not be well rounded. Be spiky…”
>Forums …search first, power clusters
Should be a forum feature; forums in videogames won’t let you walk into things like that, but then…what wrapper for it have we chosen for ourselves to not keep from wasting time picking picked brains. Does Slack do it for you at all?
>[No text in google; just schematics.]
What the snap? SVG all this time and you need a .png? Ugh. Schematic-first search sounds good though.
Starting soldering; yeaaah, but for the small pile of SMPS that need repair by the time a person is old enough to consider repairing them, that’s an 80W…120W iron, because of TO-42 and heatsinks.
>Motor move or light blink for first project.
Yeah…maybe a little grippier so one can make a cussword-activated bleeping motor that vamps on the piano or guitar? Work up to actual deep tissue massage or fail safely.
>How do you eat an elephant?
Same way you trade ebony; with your chef and banker.
I’m doing it wrong bc. maybe I just wanted the show notes to show up with the podcast. [Encourage Encourage 2016ish! Nice interview with Daffyd of TI Wales (in show 270.)]