Electronic Engineer

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Before programming, I’ve always wanted to be an Engineer or scientist of some sort. Me and a friend are starting a club for people to work on their mechanical projects after school. I have the tools and a good amount of resources, but not enough knowledge on certain things.

For an example, I would look at this and call it a chipset or a motherboard. I want to understand what all the little digits and pieces do.

With that understanding I could create some sort of tool that responds to the remote’s signal.

#2

So, this isn’t part of mechanical engineering, since it’s electrical. :point: A mechanical engineer (in general) deals with stresses, forces, and movement of mechanics. (Along with other stuff I haven’t mentioned)

What you described here is what an electrical engineer would do. You shouldn’t be wanting to know what these do (I don’t even know) until you learn about boolean logic. Learn about all the basic gates (AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR…), boolean algebra, and how to create circuits that return certain truth tables. All that would be needed for this is really just some paper, but it would be very useful to physically have all these gates, a breadboard, and some LEDs. After you get the basics down, you can learn about latches, flip-flops, counters, timers, displays, etc. From there, you will be able to google the chip number on these chips and have a solid idea of what they do.

You can PM me if you need some help getting started.

#3

We have those chips in DLD (Digital Logic Design) lab.

#4

You mean hobbyist electronics?

I used to do that too. I made a working tazer (literally burnt my skin) out of a printer’s power supply, an Arduino morse-translator, and other things. I actually still have a guide (broken and cringe) up for the translator on make magazine’s site. I even still have a soldering pen and some wire utilities.

The Arduino actually helped inspire me to get into coding.

I stopped doing it when I realized coding fails don’t cost you real money ;).

-wes

P.S: Forgot to answer the question :P. You will need to find an IR reciever, a programmable chip, and some proto-board. From there, google the hell out of anything you find. I liked going on Jameco for electronic goods.

#5

Humm…there was a kickstarter for a pen for drawing circuit traces (not new, but supposed better than existing)…what happened to that…humm…

#6

Those things take a bit to get out to the public. They got 843% of their goal though, so I am sure it will deliver; I probably will get one. This could be a cheap and easy way for me to get back into electronics :D.

-wes

#7

Sorry to be boring, but taser’s are not safe. Even the ones made in China in proper factories can result in fatalities and this is an experiment best left to youtube.

#8

Kids have this tendency to feel immortal.

In other news: Arduinos are truely fun. It’s an expensive hobby though. All those cheap little components add up really quickly. Learning about the practical side of both electrical and mechanical enginering is way more of a challenge than coding, due to wearing out, actually tearing apart, burning through, and realizing that microcontroller is unexpectedly awesome as it didn’t fizzle when you accidently pumped 1A through it for minute, when you screwed up the circuitry.

Coding is for newbies, I tell ya.

#9

@Riven & ags1
Real tazers are dangerous. What I made wasn’t really a tazer; it is just more appealing a name than “exposed DC-AC converter”. It was not even close to the buffoonery you see on youtube (quick and painful shock from a disposable camera flash), which is just a particularly large capacitor. Those can be terrible.

Mine was converting the power from a 12 volt battery (DC, usually harmless) and making a continuous small shock (AC, can be harmful in larger amps). Sure, it could make a slight burn, but even at the worst case it really wasn’t that painful. Imagine it as a slightly overpowered shock gag concentrated to a point.

I actually got in trouble for bringing it to school, although they let me off because of its harmlessness.

That said; you still should always have rubber gloves and a voltmeter when working with these things… :persecutioncomplex:

@Riven

What the hell?! What card were you using?

@JaymanHall
I never got one, although you can get programmable micro-microcontrollers that go directly onto the circuit board like you see in the OP. I can imagine those would be useful for your needs (compact).

Read up on it before you do it though; those things ain’t cheap :P.

-wes

#10

3 days later, I found some thenewboston videos and a pretty nice book called make: Electronics- http://lmgtfy.com/?q=make+electronics+pdf
(I have a lot of free time in computer class)

Things I learned:

  • What a circuit board is, how to make one, and how it works
  • That wire color is for organization and doesn’t exactly matter
  • Breadboards
  • Multimeters
  • some IDs on circuit boards (ex. SP1 = speaker 1, SP2 = speaker 2. LED1 = LED 1, etc…)

With my knowledge, I upgraded an old piano toy’s speaker and added more LEDs for more color ;D. Sadly, I was too scared to use my soldering iron and didn’t have enough hands to keep the wires in place (4 years of self teaching really helps :persecutioncomplex:).