How I Started in Electronics (& how you shouldn't)

the most frequent comment i get is how do i start in electronics so today i wanted to make a little video talking about how i got started electronics the kits i use the major takeaways i had from those kits and the challenges that i think exist for someone trying to get into electronics today also i've got a few channel update surprises coming up so make sure you stay till the end of the video to hear all about those now i want to start off by saying that i'm completely self-taught now technically i'm an electrical engineering student i'm currently in my undergrad at stanford but everything that i've done on my channel has been completely self-taught stuff i've been doing electronics for like 10 years now so way before college and you don't have to wait for some professor to teach you what it is that you want to know about electronics especially with this field it's really easy to just get out there and learn it on your own so where do you start though well let me take you back to the snap circuits kit i used as a kid this would be the first electronics kit i ever had i don't really recommend it personally it's just very low level and there isn't a lot of room for growth like the most complicated project in this kit isn't that much more difficult and you don't learn that much more from it than even the simplest product in it they have more advanced versions of this kit nowadays ones with like 300 projects but the concept is still pretty much the same there's these pre-made modules that you don't really understand what they do or how they work but you're told to connect them together in some order some way so that this way it does something now the other thing is you also don't need a lot of projects that's worth considering you don't need 300 projects really you only need a couple good projects that you can learn a lot from now the next level is probably a kit like this and in fact this is this kit that i use right after i highly recommend something like this this is the kit that changed it all for me personally and i've got like five or six different kits in my house now before you exit out of this video and try and buy this kit for yourself you can't it's actually not available anymore but don't worry stick to the end of the video and i'll let you know what you can do now why is a kit like this better though in the first place well there's three major things three major takeaways that you want from every single good electronics kit we can see the first one if we open this up and look right here it's a breadboard now learning how to use a breadboard is absolutely fundamental and you can't get into electronics without knowing how to use a breadboard the reason for this is because anytime you build a circuit in your life the first 100 prototypes you do are going to be on a breadboard i absolutely guarantee it the other thing is that this booklet is very good now it's far from perfect there's a lot of things about it that i would change but the one thing that i did really well is teach me how to read a schematic and that is the second fundamental skill you need if you can read a schematic you can build any circuit you want you can build a circuit that does anything because you can go online communicate with other electrical engineers online see the circuits that they've made because there's literally hundreds of thousands of different schematics for ridiculously cool projects all online and you can build any of them as long as you can read the schematic that's all you really need to know now the last really important thing is data sheets data sheets are amazing nothing is going to have more information than you thought you didn't need to know than a data sheet every ic transistor bjt has a data sheet and if you don't know what it is it's basically the manufacturer of a component releases this manual that gives all the properties and physical properties of this component basically now data sheets should have been mentioned in this kit's booklet but it never was the reason i learned about it though was because this kit unlike so many other kits that you find nowadays used real components and that's huge because we weren't using arduinos or snap circuits with pre-made modules we were using ics capacitors resistors components that real professional electrical engineers would use and in the beginning yeah it's super daunting you don't know what you're doing you know if we open this book up and go to the first circuit we can see the first real circuit i ever made it's a 555 timer circuit now i didn't know when i first built this circuit how important it was or how ubiquitous it appears in electronics but look at where we are now 10 years later we were doing our 8-bit cpu and the first thing we have to do is a clock module and that's based off a 555 timer then look at our next project the hexadecimal clock the first thing we've got to do for that is start off with a 5x5 timer this circuit is incredibly important my first time building it i didn't even know what i was doing i had to put it together and take it apart probably 20 times and i didn't even know what i was doing differently each 20 each of those 20 times that i tried to put it back together but eventually it worked one time and now we're here now if you want to get into electronics you're kind of out of luck they don't make this radio shack anymore radio shack went out of business a long time ago and if we look up on amazon like beginner electronic kits or basic electronic kits you can see that there really isn't that much available we have these sort of snap circuit kits that aren't going to teach you much and then we have these arduino kits which i really don't recommend for beginners the problem with trying to learn basic electronics with an arduino is that you're transforming every single hardware problem you're trying to solve into a software one so now you're not going to be learning about schematics or data sheets ics or transistors or anything like that with an arduino kit now a lot of these arduino kits market really great because there's a lot of projects you can do with them and that's just because arduino is a microcontroller just like a computer and just like a computer there's a lot of things you can do with them but you're not going to learn a lot about electronics specifically necessarily you might use a breadboard a bit but you're not going to know enough to be able to keep up with a lot of the youtube videos you see online or even some of the videos you see on this channel because of this i was thinking that i might make my own beginner electronics kit for some of my subscribers just because a lot of my subscribers have been asking me for something like this and honestly i think that a kit is one of the best ways to learn beginner electronics and when i go online and look at the beginner kits that are available now it's honestly pretty sad now i wouldn't want to make another one of these stupid kits with like 10 000 project hours or whatever that you're not going to learn anything from what i really want to do is probably create a kit that has like 20 or 25 circuits in it but really good circuits like the 555 timers so this way you can learn a lot from them and you can also use those circuits for a long long time in your electronics career anyways so let me know if you guys think that's a good idea or what you guys think about that at all as you can tell we've got a lot of stuff in the pipeline for this channel we still got the hexadecimal clock project coming up and waiting on some stuff in the mail to continue with that we also officially are on twitter so go ahead and follow us at am tech underscore circuits we're going to be posting a lot of channel updates and things like that there we're also doing a giveaway pretty soon and that's going to be orchestrated through twitter so make sure you're subscribed and following to make sure you get all the details when that happens i know this video is probably pretty boring just because it was me talking a lot about nothing but please like this video if you liked it and subscribe to see more like this my name is kiel mahdin and i will catch you guys in the next one bye

Channel: AM Tech

Views: 113,648

Keywords: how to start in electronics, learn basic electronics, 555 timer circuit, basic electronics

Id: ImnW8h9pKuk

Length: 7min 5sec (425 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/wrv505]

So the advice is... Don't wait to be taught by someone else, use a kit to get started. Here is the best kit I recommend, but it's not available to buy anymore. So let's have a look on Amazon. These are no good. Arduino's look good, but don't learn with those. If you like and subscribe I might one day build a kit to help new starters, let me know if you would buy it.

Thanks, I'm none the wiser.