I’m taking some electrical engineering courses, and it’s been suggested I learn some CAD to maybe get some autocad type jobs when I’m in school. When I looked into one of the drafting softwares, it mentioned PCBs and it got me wondering whether I could put my new knowledge to use and fuck around making circuits for shit.
The problem is, I don’t know what kind of stuff is even possible to build/how expensive it is as a hobby (not to mention, I don’t really want any more random shit laying around my house). 3D printing seems a little excessive, I just wanna fuck around with some actual working circuits.
Anyone into this kind of stuff? I think if I could get into hobby electronics it would help me understand things on another level, I just don’t have any clue how I’d even begin to investigate whether it’s something plausible for me
Thank you for the very thorough advice!
So I am finishing up a Circuits I course, which had a remote lab so I have this cheapo Espotek Labrador which has a basic oscilloscope and signal generator, plus some wires, resistors and a breadboard (couple reactive components too). But the labs were pretty much about verifying circuit theorems (Ohms law etc) and not really building anything with any sort of function.
So I’ve got basic ac/dc analysis skills, but basically 0 idea how useful circuits work (or are designed), no soldering skills, etc.
I’ll look into some more solder-oriented stuff and check out some subsreddits to see what people are up to. And some of those soldering practice kits look super cool, I’m definitely planning to give that a shot.
To add to the KiCAD recommendation, you can also use FreeCAD to bring your PCBs into 3D. It's a really solid parametric 3d modeler and has python scripting capabilities.
I've been getting really into it lately and it's just got so much to offer. It doesn't hold your hand like Fusion, but it also doesn't lock anything away from you and has a very systemic design so once you wrap your head around the primary workflows you can do some really complex stuff.
Definitely give FreeCAD another shot. There's a discord for it called Elmer that I recently fell into administrating so it's a comradely place. There are a ton of people there that will walk you through stuff and help explain how it works.
Something I've noticed with FreeCAD is that the learning curve is more like a learning cliff. For me It took 2 years of having no clue how to even do simple things then one day I started a project and everything just clicked.
The biggest hurdle is understanding how bodies and features work and something that really helped me was the Linkstage branch and some UI tweaks that make the whole interface less cluttered and confusing.
I've kinda made it my mission to teach as many people as possible how to use freecad lol
I messed around with Fusion, but didn't make anything that was even remotely parametric. Most of my experience was with Blender.
It took me about 2 weeks to get to the point where I could copy just about any real world object (that wasn't crazy organic) in FreeCAD.
I'm also a pizza delivery driver who was unemployed for a year and just bullshitted my way into a drafting job with no college education so I don't think theory is super necessary for learning it lol
Start with some basic arduino projects. Most major sensors and whatnot have modular breakout boards that work with i2c which is a basic databus system. Esp32's or tiny microcontrollers are also a good place to start. Search instructables or youtube to see what might interest you and then fuck around and find out.😉
Adafruit and sparkfun typically have project tutorials associated with the hardware they sell for another place to browse.
I knew of arduino-type stuff but hadn’t looked into it much. But it does seem interesting and like the most likely way I personally would start messing around.
So great suggestions, thank you! Especially the tutorials, I already saw a cat treat dispenser that caught my attention lol
I don't have too much experience with the hobby itself but Arduino and Raspberry Pi are designed to be fairly affordable electronics that you can tinker with. There are loads of project tutorials that guide you through everything so you can start doing things and getting hands on experience even if you don't understand all of the little details yet.
Most of these things are a one time cost as well since you can just reuse many of the components for a different project.
