| Electronics > Beginners |
| I'm spoiled by Arduino and I want to learn the things I missed out on |
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| Old Printer:
At your point the two tools that will serve you best are patience and persistence. Pretty much everything you need to know is available to you online. Learning how to find it will take some practice. I am in my mid 60's and concentrate most of my effort on organizing resources rather than memorizing laws and formulas. As said above you need to thoroughly understand the basic laws like Ohm & Kirchhoff, but a lot of it will just take time and repetition to sink in. I have found the whole process to be more gradual and less ah ha moments. Put in your time, study as much as you can, build every basic circuit you can, and come here and ask "pointed" questions and it will all come to you. |
| eugenenine:
Search for "art of electronics" on this forum, it seems a lot of people recommend it. It starts with the basics and works up from there. Interesting your using the nRF SOC, have you tried messing with any of the ANT+ functionality? |
| reboots:
--- Quote from: iamericmin on August 28, 2019, 01:44:24 am ---Why would I use a 555 timer when my uC can send precisely timed pulses? Why make a voltage divider when my uC has PWM? --- End quote --- These are great questions. #1: You wouldn't! The 555 timer is early 1970s technology. A small microcontroller is literally cheaper, and better in every way for many applications. However, there are special cases where the older part is still useful. For example, the 555 has a much higher voltage range than typical uCs. A 555 might be a good solution for a simple 12V timing application where a uC would need external driver circuitry, adding cost and complexity. #2: PWM might indeed substitute for a voltage divider. But you'll need a little bit of discrete circuitry to turn the PWM signal into a stable-ish voltage, so there is no advantage in terms of parts count. And there are drawbacks: consider that a uC will not generate PWM immediately at power on; there will be a very small lag before the PWM circuitry is initialized and enabled in firmware. If your circuit needs a known reference voltage immediately, a voltage divider would be a better choice. PWM would be more useful for cases where you want to be able to vary the voltage programmatically. Voltage dividers are cheap, simple, and basically foolproof. |
| rstofer:
I can plunk a 555 down on a breadboard, connect up a couple of resistors and capacitors and have the output before you can boot a PC to start writing code. Go easy on old-school technology. There's a reason it is still around. Try frequency modulating a fairly fast output on a uC. Then look at the simplicity of the 555 circuit: https://www.petervis.com/Radios/fm-modulator-using-555-timer-ic/fm-modulator-using-555-timer-ic.html In the divider case, you will find when you play with op amps that you sometimes need a precise VCC/2 supply. The noisy output of the uC is NOT going to be satisfactory. In fact, the application is so important that they invented a 'rail splitter' chip. Imagine that! A chip dedicated to dividing a voltage in half (and providing a buffered output). http://www.ti.com/product/TLE2426 Designers actually use these things! Arduinos are magic! In their domain, they rule! But their domain is a fairly small corner of the electronics sandbox. It's a pretty big sandbox and there is room for everybody. |
| rstofer:
"Getting Started In Electronics" by Forrest Mims is a pretty good book. https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-Mims/dp/0945053282 Amazon isn't the cheapest provider, search around. Side issue: I buy a lot of used books from Alibris.com |
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