Thread 2939116

Okay, I don't use this place much, but whatever.
I'm sort of a code monkey, still learning. I want to move on to electronics and such. Think some small shit I could be doing that wouldn't be like throwing myself dick first into a meat grinder. Maybe like a Raspberry Pi? I don't know, hence why I'm asking.
Point is, where do I start? How do I start? How expensive is that going to be? Will my wallet run dry fast?

>>2939116 (OP)
Community college or arduino program.

>>2939116 (OP)
pi's are great for that yeah, arduinos too. Anything you pick is going to have tutorials and example code all over the place. Ask ai slop how to do literally anything realistic with them and it'll basically do it for you outside of soldering.
get a pi with a case that has pin access like an argon, get some push wires and resistors and a breadboard and some leds and play around.

Building a drone or a voron would be good learner projects

>>2939116 (OP)
You want to design the equivalent to a RasPi as a first project but not 'dick first'?
Honestly your root problem is one I'm seeing it here all the time:
Goals
Plans
Then tools.
You should be wanting to achieve a real tangible advantage. Then you make a plan how to do it, maybe it will involve electronics. Then you get materials or tools as your plan says.
Like so many 3d printers and what not this RasPi will just colltect dust on a shelf in a few weeks. Because you are not driven. Because there is nothing you want to achieve that you need this for. Me at least, but I believe many, fail when trying to artificially force learning.
My first electronics projects came about like this for example:
>be me
>garden alot
>slugs
>look up solutions
>electronic fence
>sounds good
>plan a safe and energy efficient snail fence that is maximum annoying to those fuckers.
Guess what? Went through with that and learned alot. Same with everything that came after that.
Never just bought thing to olay with in the hopes inspiration will magically be bestowed upon me.
Also hate coding, some things are just not for me and maybe vice versa for you. That's always possible.
So yeah, is there nothing you want lately that you think you can solve and that might involve lots of electronics?

>>2939145
why are pi's even a thing? they are way too expensive given that an ESP32 is likely better for what you want to do. the only exception is if you need very high level linux libraries

>>2939209
you are technically wrong

>>2939211
i'd like to see how

>>2939216
last job I eveloped alot on
>picrel
platform. AMD Zynq. Basically an RPi with FPGA slapped.
The guys before who developed the predecessor product had a compute module and a discrete FPGA going.I had to work on those machines sometimes
The integrated solution had many benefits.
Regardless: My point is that both devices were products for critical infrastructure so in case you like to think in tierlists that's certainly at least a step of industrial hardware. The ARM cores / RPi environment behaved very well. Also in climate chamber, burn tests, EMI tests, ESD and probably more. 10/10 would buy again.

>>2939116 (OP)
ESP32 is the current gold standard for /diy/ microcontroller stuff. It's extremely cheap and extremely capable, comes in all kinds of variants that can do different stuff.
>Point is, where do I start?
Despite ESP32 being the gold standard, Arduino is still a bit better for a starting place if you don't know anything about microcontrollers.
>How do I start?
Buy any chinkshit Arduino starter kit from Amazon/Aliexpress, go through basic tutorials, blinking LEDs, using buttons, switches, driving servos with PWM, driving motors with MOSFETs. Once you got that down, you might want to actually have a useful project you want to do and around this point, make the switch to esp32.
>How expensive is that going to be? Will my wallet run dry fast?
Arduino starter kits, as long as they are non-genuine, are like $20-$30. ESP32 are $4-$6 each. Microcontroller stuff is generally extremely cheap.
>Raspi
You don't need a raspi for anything.

>>2939116 (OP)
Get a cheap thin client and UM232H module instead.

>>2939229
chinkshit Arduino starter kit
I can only repeat my point made here:
>>2939197
'Hey kiddo are you excited in yet another futile exercise? Today we will dim an LED using a photoresistor in the feedback loop. Arent you sooo motivated? '

>>2939256
It's difficult to know what you can do and how when you don't know what you can do, nor how. You're much more likely to come up with a retarded way of doing [thing], or worse yet, make a retarded thread about how you're gonna do [thing] in a retarded way, when you don't have any basics whatsoever. Doing 5-6 arduino tutorials is maybe an afternoon's worth of effort and you can either continue fucking around with that, or move on to practical things if you think you have grasped the concepts.
Of course nowadays AI can handhold you through anything /diy/-level, but then OP wouldn't have made this thread if he could use AI.

>>2939116 (OP)
if you are looking for a project you could reverse engineer the remotes or bluetooth devices in your home using an ESP32. I just did that with a few of my devices and paired them to ESPhome to make my home slightly 'smarter'

>>2939258
You learn by doing thing the retarded way. When I was a kid I always built the most simlle circuit to get me X. It functioned poorly so I made improvements. And after a whole lot of design work, manufacture and testing I'd have a stupidly bulky circuit and realised: 'They sell ICs that are exactly thatmI could have just bought that and slapped output circuitry and some glue logic on. But I never regretted it. It's reassuring to find someone else came up with exactly the same and sells it as a product and you know you learned something. Next you put your perfboard thing in the box of things, buy the IC for 5 bux and carry on.

>>2939116 (OP)
Learn to code first. Get the Arduino program. /diy/ is a slow board.

>>2939458
Didnt OP literally state in the second (2.)! sentence, OP was a code monkey and wants into hw?
Is the zoomers attention span really that fucked?

>>2939116 (OP)
That's like saying "I want to learn languages", without further info we can't tell you.

Want to build small electronics projects made up of mostly modules and have your code interact with the outside world?
SBCs like the Raspberry Pi if you want to have processing power and/or run a server
Microcontrollers like ESP8266 if you want IoT functionality
Microcontrollers like arduino or ESP32 if you don't want IoT.

For all 3 of these there's a world of resources out there, and frankly 95% of the work in those is the coding part and understanding of IO. The electronics are basically plug and play, maybe read up on pullup/pulldown resistors but that's about it.
The thread on here for that is /mcg/.

If you want to actually build circuits and pcbs and do more complex stuff, then /ohm/ is your resource, and a great book covering a lot of what you need there is picrel. The first is the actual theory, the second is more hands on. It's fairly advanced, so on the level you'd expect in the first semesters of an electrical engineering major in university, but not too complex if you pay attention.
Think of it as the SICP of EE.

>>2939116 (OP)
raspberry pi's and things like it are NOT electronics, they are computers. try building a linear power supply before we stampede to builidng a super computer to write a shopping list.

>>2939476
Arguably Anon here's got a point.
I did argue earlier >>2939197 that in order to remain motivated one needs a goal first and then choose the tool, and not make up reasons to use the tool.
Maybe OP can reach middle ground:
You can not into electronics without voltage sources, curent sources, multimeter and preferably oscilloscope.
Of all of those you can create low performance examples from mostly discrete components yourself.
Get a ~80V SMPS. 10 bux. Then construct several buck regulators that bring you within linear regulator range for your target. Then build linear rlvoltage regulators that at least span the range from the previous to the next buck converters output. Also current limiters.All that's missing is a few relais, a UI and some simple logic to switch from one range to the next when the user cranks it.
Get an enclosure and banana plugs.
There. You learned some basic electronics. You acquired a few manual skills too. And you didnt really need a natural goal and yet you did something useful for your electronics education: Build one of your first pieces of lab equipment.
Next try a bench top multimeter or a scope. In a pinch you can always offload your work to the integrated silicone structure merchant.

>>2939116 (OP)
The raspberry pi is a mini linux computer, there’s nothing special about it except it’s over-priced and/or not that good.
> but it had gpio pins
In the olden days, all PCs had gpio in the form of a parallel port.
Now you can just get a USB to parallel port cable (or 10) and be done with it. Or some other break-out board, or plug-in card.

>>2939535
>linux computer
KEK its fucking arm cores, you compile for arm or get a binary delivered and run it the silicon doesnt care about OS

>>2939574
99.99999999% of raspis run loonix thoughever

>>2939698
So? Most oxy torches get the cutting attachement slapped on and are relegated to only ever cutting and heating. Does this mean they generically are cutting torches?

>>2939229
there is an arduino with an esp 32 now
just start with this imo op

>>2939116 (OP)
electronics is following the trajectory of software, at first there were programmers who knew how to write code and made usefull things with it. then there were webshitters pushing useless shit and now everything is frameworks and packages and nobody knows how to write software and its all shit
people used to know about electronics (ohms law, kirchoffs laws, nodal analysis, voltage dividers, bjts, inductors and capacitors, digital logic is a pretty typical curriculum to start), then sparkfun and adafruit pumped out a load of afwul shit kits that dont teach you anything and now electronics as a hobby doesnt exist you just buy an ic which does exactly what you want and thats the end of it.

if you realyl want to get into electronics, when i was a kid they had these things 'x in one project lab' (160, 250, 500 in 1 etc) where you get components and a little guide for how to build a few projects and then a bunch more where its just schematic and no help you have to work it out. i'd say start with something like that if you can find one.

People arent getting any more charitable. The opposite now one person has to do everything with no help so we need stuff to close the gap.

>>2939116 (OP)
watch some vids, plenty on youtube. Start with easy project to see if you like to do it. I started with too complex a project and got bogged down.

>>2939722
Yes, that's exactly what it means and what people call them.

sometimes lurker here, are there ever any PLC threads?

Sure they cost a lot more but how many controllers do you really need for home projects? Click PLCs are even in the sub $100 range.

Rather than using an arduino and spending dozens of hours writing motion control from scratch, I can do the same thing within a couple of hours or less not needing to reinvent the wheel. Industrially rated, DIN rail ready, no breakout boards needed, etc.. I guess you guys build radios and do other stuff more IoT related

>>2940063
>PLC threads
I've seen them here and there, I guess it's fairly rare.
>Rather than using an arduino and spending dozens of hours writing motion control from scratch
Nowadays you wouldn't hand-write basic bitch stuff for popular platforms, just open Grok and tell it to write whatever for arduino, it's either gonna one-shot it, or get close enough.

>>2940008
You're stupid. I cant help with that.

kek