New to Electronics

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1

hello everyone.

I am pretty new to electronics , am from mechanical background. I am very much intrested in taking up electronics as my hobby and wanted to play with some electromechanical stuff in future.

Could any one guide me where to start from . I have been browsing SFE for a while but coudnt figure out where to start.

Thanks

2

Try the Electronics101 Yahoo group, it’s intended for complete beginners.

The best introduction to electronics is the book The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill.

Leon

3

I think you should pick something you want to build and work it our from there.

Otherwise It’s hard to recommend a starting point.

My starting point was to buy a few PIC micro controllers a breadboard, loats of passive components (resistors, capacitors, clock crystals, etc…) then use a schematic and make my own programmer for the PIC. Then ofcorse, I blinked loats of leds, blinking leds it’s a must :slight_smile:

4

“Lessons in Electric Circuits” is also a good place to start. Start right at the start, i.e. with the important stuff such as Ohm’s Law which you’ll be lost without.

http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/

5

Hello,

I’ve spent about a few days researching, but I still don’t know where to start. I have an OLED watch that I want to reprogram to display in binary (among other things). It has a mini USB port on it.

I have two main questions:

Is there any specific language I should use?

I’d like to use python because I keep hearing about it and want to learn.

How do I get my program on the watch?

Do I need a UBW or a PIC or a breadboard or can I just use hyperterm?

If someone could answer those for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

6

I assume you’re talking about this watch:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/8e18/

I’m not sure you’ll be able to reprogram it because a lot of electronics companies make their products in such a way that end users can’t modify the firmware. I guess the first thing to do would be to find out what it’s using for electronic hardware - most importantly, figuring out what cpu they put in it.

7

leon_heller:
Try the Electronics101 Yahoo group, it’s intended for complete beginners.

The best introduction to electronics is the book The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill.

Leon

I think Electronics101 has been abandoned… To much spam…

8

It’s very active, and no spam!

Leon

9

leon_heller:
It’s very active, and no spam!

Leon

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/electronics101 Right?

10

matthew945:

leon_heller:
It’s very active, and no spam!

Leon

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/electronics101 Right?

Ahh… Electronics_101 instead of Electronics101

11

Sorry, I should have checked the group name. I didn’t know that there were two similar ones.

Leon