How can I get into soldering and electronics? I'm already

tardunio and RasPi are 2 important communities that welcome clueless noobs like you, and provide all the support you need as long as you're willing to blow a guy or two.
(just kidding, handjobs will do)

>>1211947

Look at adafruit. She sells a lot of kits with good instructions. Also familiarize yourself with Sparkfun and similar places to get ideas for fun projects.

>>1211952
Thank God, I hate the taste of cummies that aren't daddy's

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Get a USB soldering iron, it's like $5 and it will do everything you want for small electronics. It comes with a tiny bit of solder to get you started but you will want more, and a sponge to clean it with, just wet it slightly then roll the hot tip on it to clean off old solder.

>>1211952
>>1211953
adafruit, sparkfun, arduino
all absolute shite aimed at selling you shiny trinkets to impress your friends without any understanding.
just buy these parts, connect together as this diagram shows, download this code already written, now it does something useless.
perfect for anyone who hates learning new skills or has no interest in trying to understand how things work.
is that what you want op? then go for it!

don't get a soldering iron you don't need one. dont hoard old electronics, the parts are either too old and fucked or too new and impossible to use now.

go find a book on analog electronics written sometime before or in the early 2000's. read it cover to cover. if you are still interested then you already know what components you need to build a few circuits to experiment. build them on breadboard. go find one of the x-in-1 'kids' toys that gives you all the components and a book of projects to build that actually explains the fundamentals.
if you already know about computers then you will know the basics of how processors operate so the jump to digital should be easy.

>>1211957
Don't listen to this anon
You won't enjoy soldering with one of those
Get a basic adjustable Weller or Hakko; the actual soldering experience is better and chances are you'd buy one after 6 months of hobby projects anyway

>>1211985
10 minutes on their website and every one of their "tutorials" is just a means to shill their products and is usually one of the least informative articles on the given topic. It's almost as if it is a business trying to convince people they actually care about the maker community

>>1212113
wow i'm fucking floored that someone out there sees this. everyone i know is constantly sucking them off like they are gods gift to embedded systems.

>>1212113
These companies more or less ARE the maker community. I don't really see much more to making than buying prefab stuff and plugging/hot-gluing it together. Any deeper and you're getting into an actual specialty like electronics or mechanical engineering. To be fair, Sparkfun is on the advanced end of that Home Depot of Electronics market and occasionally carries some nice modules and tools at a markup bordering on ridiculous.

>>1211947
A solid understanding of Ohm's Law and Kirckhoff's Laws plus a few rules of thumb may be enough for now, especially if you're mostly just slumming it at frequencies near dc, sequencing outputs with microcontrollers, and working with relatively low currents. Beyond that, you'll really want to understand first principles and be prepared to acquire some specialized tools, like an oscilloscope, a logic analyzer, or a function generator. While there are cheap general substitutes available in the form of the Bus Pirate or the sound-card oscilloscope, they might or might not be enough for what you want to do.
>>1212113
knows what the hell he's talking about. You listen to him, anon.

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>>1211947
I'm going to have to disagree with the sentiment here that Arduino etc is garbage. I never would have realized the potential of microprocessors, or even have taken an interest in electronics if it weren't for Arduino. While I agree that the primary purpose of Arduino seems to be a basic starter platform for hobbyists it can also demonstrate some great potential.

In the end, it will be different strokes for different folks. You may enjoy opening a book and reading it cover to cover, and that may get you interested. You may be like me, tinker a bit and realize that you're severely lacking in knowledge, and start learning what you need bit by bit. You may even just decide it's not for you. In any case try what you would think will get you interested in electronics.

>>1212204
boo hoo
arduino is a platform specifically designed to cripple the host microcontroller and abstract low level functionality into oblivion.

why do you want to waste your time learning essentially some api when you could just read the datasheet and actually gain some understanding of how it really works? i guess if thats your bag then fine but i just don't understand the mindset. why do you need to convince yourself of potential? either you are into it or you are not.

>>1212227
>why do you want to waste your time

Ah, it always devolves to
>you should do your hobby my way or else you're wasting your time

>>1212204
>he uses a 7805
>in a TO-220 package
3.5/10 are you really pulling 220V from the mains?

>>1212227
To be fair, microcontrollers don't give a hell of a lot of feedback when you mess up. Even something as silly as a single blinking LED on a GPIO, when running from bare metal, could go wrong many ways, all of which lead to the same non-operational state. I mean, one could always start with Forth, which is about as low-level as one can get while still hosting some sort of debug and edit capability. I just don't see all that many howtos that take such an approach.

>>1211947
So tell us a bit more about your programming experience to date and what sorts of gadgets you would like to be building. Maybe knowing where you're coming from will help us suggest a route for you to get to where you would like to be.

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nodemcu

>>1212232
>220V from mains

No, I'm using a separate board. I don't have an oscilloscope so I haven't made my own power supply for it. When I eventually get one I'm going to design my own.

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>>1212234
>nodemcu
Highly underrated. Lua is respectably light-weight, the APIs aren't too ridiculous, and you still get TCP/IP capability.

>>1212232
>I mean, one could always start with Forth, which is about as low-level as one can get while still hosting some sort of debug and edit capability. I just don't see all that many howtos that take such an approach.

I'm not sure I follow this, or the rest of your comment.

AVRs and other microcontrollers are very easy to work with even in assembly language if you have some degree of intelligence. Start with something simple, like blinking an LED. If it fucks that up you have made a rookie mistake like overflowing the stack.

Then build from there. Add a pushbutton to enable or disable the LED. Don't fuck with the code that works.

For excellent feedback you add a 20x4 or similar LCD. Use the pushbutton to display different things. Again, baby steps. Don't fuck with code that works, or if you must, keep copies of the old code so you can undo mistakes that are hard to fix.

The best thing I ever did was to edit avrdude so that it could put a serial number in the eeprom, along with the date and the name of the file, and to also log all of this information in a text file. Years later, when I'm looking at a box and wondering why the hell it does so-and-so, all I have to do is get the serial number either by reading the eeprom or just reading it off the box if I labeled it, and then find the last entry in the text file so that I know exactly what code is in the box.

AVRs are fun if you have the right mindset. If you think you need some sort of host that can debug an operating AVR then maybe you should be working with something more high-level.

>>1211957
Yes, if you want to annoy the shit out of yourself

>>1211947
>>1209426

>>1211947
watch bigclive

>>1212436
>I'm not sure I follow this, or the rest of your comment.
Just burn the image, connect your handy USB-to-TTL-serial dongle, and get to hacking. You can patch or develop simple words interactively on the device quite easily. You can burn a new ROM image with whatever new words you like. You can still modify the SFRs to your heart's content. And you can even write words interactively in asm when you're feeling sluggish or daring. It's a great babby-level way to explore the hardware without throwing code over the wall and hoping for the best, while still being quite competent as a basis for production systems.
>The best thing I ever did was to edit avrdude so that it could put a serial number in the eeprom
That is genius, sempai. I'll have to do that next time I pick AVRs back up.
>AVRs are fun if you have the right mindset.
Agree. The right mindset is developed, not innate.
>If you think you need some sort of host that can debug an operating AVR then maybe you should be working with something more high-level.
Disagree. Even pros single-step their hardware to debug complex systems. If they can afford the space, they may even set up a gdb host.

Now now now, aside from all the adafruit, sparkfun, arduino, etc hate here; i gotta admit the WiFi module sparkfun sells is surprisingly strong, cheap and easy to use if you just need the mindless "send command, get result" to add WiFi to almost everything.

>>1212227
>why do you want to waste your time learning essentially some api when you could just read the datasheet and actually gain some understanding of how it really works?

I don't want to waste time reading the datasheet and learning to program microcontrollers. I want to make stuff and arduino provides an easy and powerful platform to do so while still being dirt cheap. Are you seriously mad that people aren't as purist as you? You do your way and I'll do mine.

>>1213156
> I am not interested in learning, only parroting what a company tells me I should know

Why exactly are you on this board..?

>>1213156
but m8 just get the MC datasheet/manual and it tells you everything. The hard part of assembly is getting that the chip is dumb as rocks and simple.

>>1213156
Well, i'm only a first year student of EE, so, I don't know a thing about life; but I could learn through experience why you shouldn't use arduino for anything that requires the littlest bit of precision.

Our assigment was to make a thermometer and have it display the themperature on a lolshield.
Anyways, i realized my project was having trouble just giving a straight, constant temperature. It took me a long time trying to understand why it wasn't measuring right. I did everything as it was supossed to be.
Then it hit me. Arduino is so shitty, it couldn't even mantain it's voltage source straight. When more Leds from the shield where on (for example, when making an 88 instead of an 11), it tinkered with the same voltage that worked as reference for the thermal resistor.

That way, it would always be off.

>>1213219
>i realized my project was having trouble just giving a straight, constant temperature.

Make sure you follow the datasheet recommendations. I was getting erratic temperatures from an LM35 until I put the tiny capacitor (maybe it was two ) near the sensor like they recommended.

In my case a very low power device was trying to send a signal over a fairly long cable, and the suggested components cleaned it up.

>>1213156
There is absolutely nothing purist about it.
If you want to actually learn about electronics stay away.
If you just want to show off to your friends then fill your boots I couldn't give a fuck.
I won't apologise for being dismissive of it as a hobby because I don't understand the point of something that has no opportunity for personal development or growth.

>>1213260
>I don't understand the point of something that has no opportunity for personal development or growth.
>t.bourgeois
The point is to make things that do stuff.
t.proletarian

>>1213337
nigger a thingmajig to program micro processors+ said MCs and sensors is way cheaper than a arduino/raspberry

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>>1213156
>arduino provides an easy and powerful platform
>powerful
You really drank the jool-aid, didn't you? There is literally nothing to recommend any 16MHz ardweenie over the 60MHz xtensa-based Espressif modules, other than a library of crap APIs and a goofy form factor.

>>1213219
Pic related is the mark of an incompetent designer, >>1213337 notwithstanding.

>>1213355
True, and relevant, but that's not what anon was on about.

>>1213374
>proletarian
>bourgois
>True, and relevant, but that's not what anon was on about.

>>1213337
If you want something that performs a function you might as well just buy it.
The amount of effort you have to put in to build these kits you can't make the diy argument because you aren't, someone else has done it for you.

>>1213374
>Pic related is the mark of an incompetent designer,

the 7805 is the mark of what? Maybe I misunderstood your point.

>>1213386
>The amount of effort you have to put in to build these kits you can't make the diy argument
>t.Thomas Thwaites
How very binary of you. I suppose that, if the exact function I need doesn't exist on the muh open market, I should just do without? Ease of use is a valid metric. So is personal groaf but often enough it's not the primary metric when some problem needs to be solved. Continua, anon.

>>1213387
>the 7805 is the mark of what
Amateurs, dude. It's the mark of people who can't into power supplies and want to encourage the heat death of the universe.

>>1213397
>Amateurs, dude. It's the mark of people who can't into power supplies and want to encourage the heat death of the universe.

awesome.

can you post anything that isn't memetalk?

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>>1213397
>Amateurs, dude. It's the mark of people who can't into power supplies and want to encourage the heat death of the universe.

Yeah, because hassling a switching supply and further polluting the RF spectrum is worth it when you're trying to get a few mA to a microcontroller and an LED...

>>1213397
>if the exact function I need
>need
first of all learn the meaning of this word please

>i should just do without
secondly i didn't say you couldn't or shouldn't, i said fill your boots. but its not a hobby, its a means to an end.

i'm going to stop replying to you because you are coming across as a bit of a knob.

>>1213397
>heat death of the universe.
when the moon and stars align occasionally you will find that it is the more efficient choice.
either way the sun is going to burn out whether we use it or not. might as well make the most of it, quick turn all your appliances on.
we can't efficiently store enough energy to smooth out running on unpredictable renewables, you want to store the output from a dyson sphere?

this would such a better board if people put 1/10-th as much effort into doing projects as they put into shitting on others over trivialities.

>>1213403
>implying that 7805s aren't the meme

>>1213407
>implying that the "unregulated" voltage coming into your circuit in the first place isn't probably provided by a wall adapter that is probably not a switcher

>>1213411
>we can't efficiently store enough energy to smooth out running on unpredictable renewables
That's because we insist that the supply conform to our demand rather than vice versa. Hence, the concept of the smart grid, and the unrecognized reality that we're holding it wrong.

>>1212204

>Anon is STILL posting the image of his cookie-cutter clock every chance he gets

Holy shit man move on it's been months m8

>>1212436
I hate to say it but I agree with this guy. Most of the "maker" community is a huge meme that is only looking to make a quick buck under the guise of teaching you shit.

At least raspberry pi's work in the sense that they're an ACTUAL computer and are much more flexible as such.

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>>1213489
>cookie cutter
>made it myself
>cookie cutter

I don't think you know the words you're using.

Also, it's one of my only projects because I have been busy being a father. It's a good example of someone starting with nothing but "blink this LED" in Arduino and actually making something completely on their own that works. Stop being jealous. Where's your projects? It's been months m8 why no projects?