I can think of lots of reasons why someone might want to ‘dip their big toe’ into the electronics world. If you’re old and retired like me, maybe you’d just like something to do to keep your mind active. Or maybe you’d like to be able to help your kid, or grandkid try it out. Maybe you’re just a young whippersnapper and are wondering about electronics, electro-mechanics, or mechatronics, animatronics as a career.
No matter who you are — welcome!
I thought I would start a little series to help you start playing around a little to either get started if you know already, or just to provide some info to help you decide if you’d like to pursue it. It’s going to be about more than just electronics. Electronics, mechanics, programming, and ‘making’ are all intertwined now. And rather than talking solely about electronics, we’ll be talking a lot about using electricity, electronics, mechanics, and programming to make things light up and move. So get ready to enter a fascinating world with a variety of adventures with things like LEDs, motors, relays, solenoids, microcontrollers, Arduinos, robotics, animatronics, and super-fun stuff like that!
I still remember my first exposure to electronics as a Junior in high school and my teacher, who I should probably keep nameless. He was a tall, skinny guy who liked to rub mine and my classmates’ shoulders a little too much, we all thought. But aside from that, about all I remember from that class is that we used to charge up capacitors and zap each other with them.
So high school doesn’t really count, but I took a year and a half course in vocational school called Electro-Mechanical Technology which pretty much set the course for most of my life. I worked seriously with electronics for a couple of years, but took a couple of other career paths after that. Through it all, though, electronics has been an off-again on-again hobby much of my life.
Don’t worry, there won’t be lots of theory!
When I was in vocational school, I had to learn all sorts of theory about how transistors are made and lots of complicated math to understand electron flow. This isn’t going to be about that. If you want to really dig into that stuff, you’ll have to find most of it somewhere else. Although some of it will be needed here, I’m going to try to keep it to a minimum.
For instance, I want to start by getting you to feel the excitement of lighting up a little light bulb (LED actually). But I’m not going to try to teach you deep theory of how an LED works. I’ll just brush the surface of that on our way to actually getting it to light up.
Here I am in my second job out of school, repairing video game circuit boards.
My coworkers with loads of job security 🙂
Here I am about 45 years later…still loving good old electro-mechanical technology!