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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently trying to shift my out-of-hours efforts over to more hardware work (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, now Udoo and Cubieboard).

I feel like I'm missing a huge amount of electronics knowledge as soon as I see a discussion about how such and such a trace has been misplaced on a revision of a board or how certain pins could have been better used as an extra SD card reader (ref: the Udoo board)

Is there a less time-intensive way to pick up an understanding of hardware (I'm currently a software guy) than to go an do an ME or EE? I'm certainly not looking for an easy way out but at the moment it feels like trying to go from crawling to supersonic flight.

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Have you looked at nand2tetris? http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Going even farther back up the chain there's stuff like this: http://www.jpmsupply.com/servlet/the-1082/AM,-Radio,-Solder/...

NAND2Tetris looks fantastic, thank you!

Actually, building and playing with published Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects wouldn't be too bad a way to go. Most of the designs are open, and hobbyists tend not to overcomplicate things. See how many layers of the onion you can peel back, or what small changes you can make.

Choose a board and see how much mileage you can get out of it.

For the lowest level nuts and bolts, Horowitz and Hill's _Art of Electronics_ is still a classic. Going through the first few chapter exercises will get you thinking in terms of voltages and currents.

Heh, I seem to lose motivation after the first set of blinkenlights, or (this week) when I burnt out my one buzzer by misreading which resistor it needed.

I think I'll go back to a breadboard for a while - Art of Electronics looks like what I need right now.

Edit: Egads! $150AUD for that book

Try for an older edition, second hand. The fundamentals haven't changed.

In fact, that brings up an idea for a way that hardware is sometimes easier than software. The laws of physics that constrain our designs don't go obsolete every 2 weeks.

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