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.
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.
In the past, you could type 'west African woman learn english from scratch' in youtube or google and you'd get it. Now I bet a third of the results is nonsense and the two thirds are probably news related results on west africa or english west african political relations, history, etc and probably some ads for rosetta stone.
It's unbelievable how shallow and narrow and bad google/youtube search has become. It didn't happen over night. Year by year, little by litte, it got worse and worse.
Lol I tried searching those exact keywords in google and this thread is like the 5th result, but still no dice on the actual target. I wonder how many west African women teach English from scratch on YouTube.
It's unfortunate. Think how powerful such a channel is, people can teach themselves how to read at a whim. Nope, its hidden behind politically charged nonsense for some reason. You can't search stuff about black people or African people anymore without getting a bunch of speech giving grifters, I want this fantastic woman who teaches illiterate underprivileged women how to read because she's a fantastic teacher but all I get is overpriviledged women lecturing and propagandizing. The irony of it is ridiculous.
Well, I don't use a google account and use invidious and piped as proxies, so that's a no go for me.
It shouldn't be this hard to find something this specific on a video host with the worlds most powerful search engine bedded into it. It's gotten to the point where I archive and store links for anything I might want to find later, but I found this before I was of that mindset and I've wanted to share it with people. When search rot is worse than link rot there's a big problem.
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 :-) )
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.
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.
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).
You do NOT need this as a hobbyist. I will go as far to say it will be counter productive. Pickup Art of Electronics or the lab manual that comes with it instead.
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!
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...
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?
Thanks for this feedback! I admittedly am not sure, to answer your last question. I am approaching it as one of those "I will know it, when I get there" sort of thing - example: i have replaced (successfully!) individual gears within a 900cc inline 4 motorcycle engine, I have performed the replacement of many different systems / components to home HVAC and larger appliances (without any formal training - some of these endeavors took longer than the aforementioned motorcycle transmission work, due to lack of instruction/schematic access). Would I do these things again? Absolutely not! But I'm a little stubborn as I will try and complete something to best of my abilities and will either reach a cognitive or personal initiative limit.
Academic resources will never get to a useful punchline. Maybe try a hands-on course like this for general electronics and PCBs https://youtu.be/aqVgYasrBs0
Avoid lithium ion batteries. Use a deep discharge lead acid battery instead.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've really enjoyed this exchange. I come to HN to have my thoughts provoked. Thank you.
One of the most shocking things (no pun initially intended) about learning electronics [as someone who has spent absurd amounts of time tweaking the user experience of interacting with text input elements] is the cold realization that you have to manually handle switch bounce. Because physics.
Wait, I have to think about how tiny bits of widget bounce when they come into contact with each other? Every button and every encoder? You'be got to be kidding me.
And so you set out on the dark road as you first wonder WTF is going on with your counter, then you start tracking the time between pulses. Then you learn about hardware interrupts and state machines and oscilloscopes. Then you learn about RC and Schottky diodes and soon, hex inverters.
Would I benefit from a two hour lecture about the math behind RC calculations? It might be interesting, but at some point if you pull enough yarn out of the sweater, it stops keeping you warm.
I have always really enjoyed clever and/or obsessive answers to "describe what happens when you type a URL into your browser". If someone starts with the mechanical behaviour of a cherry switch before talking about the USB protocol, is this not the free jazz of computer science?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Razavi has authored several well-known textbooks, one of which is on introductory microelectronics, the subject of these videos. Linear circuits are covered in prerequisite courses.
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.
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.
