But I’ve completed my “past learning”. Haha!
Anyways, I received an electronics lab from Radio Shack when I was 12 or so at Christmas Time(I don’t remember asking for it so I suppose it was my computer technician of a father who hatched the idea) and I liked building the projects using the digestible drawings and watching it come alive. Of course, I had no understanding of pretty much anything at the time…
So that’s what I’m trying to do now. I come from a programming background(During my teenage years and during the first few years of college: I’m now a junior in college) and I’m now intensely interested in electronics as I want to be completely enabled to design robots from every possible angle imaginable(so that angle doesn’t become a future hindrance), so I’m seeking to acquire the foundational knowledge. I’ve been using MIT’s OpenCourseWare at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm and have been slodging through the coursework and videos, and I’m using the book at http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/, and I’m also using Tina’s circuit simulator to build the circuits and watching them act! I’m more interested in digital circuitry but I’m trying to not allow analog circuits become an Achilles heel. So far, I’ve built a Binary counter that runs off a 555 Timer IC and displayed the counting on my own digital logic gates to output to an LED number display(I later replaced that with a binary-to-LCD display IC since my simulator seems to choke on all the computation necessary for simulation) and now I’m trying to master memory elements so I could implement a finite state machine of my own design. After that, I’m hoping to master the electronics of radio control and wireless communication to a degree that’d enable me to implement wireless communication interfaces on my bots. Anyways, I can do some pretty cool things and I can hard-wire “memory” using digital logic gates(without feedback that enables real “memory” elements), but it wouldn’t be programmable or changeable… haha. After that, ARMS, PICs(or whatever micrcontrollers) are the next step(Well, possibly before or during the radio) and I’ll be re-entering the familiar world of programming which will hopefully tie everything together.
