My purchase of an arduino kit at the end of highschool. This has essentially passively introduced me to a lot of basic electronics over the years without explicitly studying them. And so now I sometimes think “I want to measure my heart rate” or “I want to build a DIY custom keyboard” or “I want a physical pomodoro timer with just one button and 3 LEDs” and I can just order some parts, build the thing, and have a new tool that solves a simple problem.
I sometimes try to recommend other people build something simple with electronics occasionally, only to realize that they don’t even have any kind of microcontroller. Whereas for me it has become nearly as primitive an action as ‘make a simple bash/python script for this.’ Having the ability to produce electronics has opened up a multitude of solutions that I didn’t even quite realize until I noticed other people getting stuck without this capacity.
The mere presence of electronics in my life encouraged acquiring many other small pieces of knowledge such as what a diode is and why it is useful. What a transistor actually is (which I had theoretically learned in college, but when I needed to make an electrically controlled switch ‘transistor’ did not come to mind as a thing I could buy at the store). This also led to some skills like learning to solder and desolder, and learning to use a 3D printer. Which also was a massive boon that deserves its own answer.
My purchase of an arduino kit at the end of highschool. This has essentially passively introduced me to a lot of basic electronics over the years without explicitly studying them. And so now I sometimes think “I want to measure my heart rate” or “I want to build a DIY custom keyboard” or “I want a physical pomodoro timer with just one button and 3 LEDs” and I can just order some parts, build the thing, and have a new tool that solves a simple problem.
I sometimes try to recommend other people build something simple with electronics occasionally, only to realize that they don’t even have any kind of microcontroller. Whereas for me it has become nearly as primitive an action as ‘make a simple bash/python script for this.’ Having the ability to produce electronics has opened up a multitude of solutions that I didn’t even quite realize until I noticed other people getting stuck without this capacity.
The mere presence of electronics in my life encouraged acquiring many other small pieces of knowledge such as what a diode is and why it is useful. What a transistor actually is (which I had theoretically learned in college, but when I needed to make an electrically controlled switch ‘transistor’ did not come to mind as a thing I could buy at the store). This also led to some skills like learning to solder and desolder, and learning to use a 3D printer. Which also was a massive boon that deserves its own answer.