I have a broad tech background in electronics and custom hardware design and have been tossing this idea back and forth. What could I help teach leftists who want to learn electronics? There are a lot of subjects such as cyber security, RF scanning and monitoring, reverse engineering and so on that would make for a great beginner course for lefties who don't know where to start. What would you want to learn?
One thing that would probably be useful for people is how to fix broken electronics (phone cables, especially) with soldering, heat shrinks, etc
Basically teaching people how to fix (maybe even improve) the tech they have so they don't feel the need buy new stuff (and create more trash).
Great point and definitely feeds into the self sufficiency model within your local community. I could also do like what tools are important/key, portable lab ideas, etc.
Definitely. Also might be useful to go over how to properly secure your data, browse and communicate privately, etc
Might not fit in EE topics though, but definitely worth people knowing.
EE is part of the greater Technology umbrella and definitely deserves it's own entire section. I would love to make like a "Leftist Tech wiki" with all of this in it with lessons, etc.
We should bug the mods to introduce post flairs so we can tag a c/Technology post EE or CS etc
And wikis (and hopefully secure file hosting) should be the next step for this community
No more having to rely on marxist.org getting resources taken away due to copyright
Id love to use more opensource software, but a lot of it you need to host/assemble your self from github. Maybe it would be useful to teach that? And how to be independent from facebook, yt, etc by using rss
Also a great point on the open source side of things, like how to license/use everything under an open source license and how to navigate that, so that you aren't beholden to any one sites' TOS and get your entire project retroactively owned by the hosting company.
That sounds important. Maybe also explain how opensource even really works lol idk
This is something I'd be delighted to help people with. Feel free to make a post if you need help building any kind of open source software. There's a lot to it between version control systems, compilers, build systems, dependencies, but most projects you encounter can be built from source and put to use following a handful of guidelines.
Teaching people the basics of Arduino programming and bread-boarding might potentially offer the best bang for the buck. The materials are low cost, the software is free, and there are a lot of fascinating things you can do. You can make all sorts of circuits on a bread-board without even needing to pick up a soldering iron, and take them apart again if you want to build something else.
It does seem like we have at least a handful of amateur radio operators on here as well. I'd be glad to throw my two cents in wherever I can.
So there are a lot of really good beginner tutorials on electronics, much better than I could ever produce and I'm sure I could incorporate those into the plan and host the wiki somewhere like on AWS. Ideally I would love to make this an open collaboration so that we can all work on improving it.
I'd like to learn chip design. But I don't think that's as broadly applicable as some of the other suggestions.
(Mostly I've just been afraid to ask - can I just glue a bunch of functional units / decoders / etc together and they'll work? Or is that a bad abstraction and I still need to care about circuity stuff?)
