Hi hope you can see me I'm uh doing a uh walk time rant or not really a rant, more of a uh Q&A questions and answers I thought I'd just answer a question from The Forum as you know in the walk time sort of uh format so hopefully you can hear me and hopefully the wind isn't uh, too bad today it's a little bit windy. maybe I need to wear a a uh, a dead cat? uh, win a mic with a little dead cat on it or something I don't know. Anyway, the question comes from uh Shane 95 from The Forum and he asked an excellent question about uh. he basically wants to learn electronics and his question is is designing a kit a good way to do it and the reason he asked that is cuz he heard on my live show.

uh I answered a question from an 11year old uh kid who asked a similar question how to learn electronics and it's a good question should you do a kit or design a real product to uh in in order to learn Electronics Well, the traditional uh way to learn Electronics of course it still stands is just to design as many circuits as you can build them. Most important and uh, and fail of course, fail is a big one. You must fail in order to learn, but it's one thing to build up your circuit on your breadboard. uh, for example and just uh and and it works.

Okay, you might fail, you debug it, it works. Then you might build it into a case, a oneoff case, and your mate might lay out a board for it. That's great. Everything's You know you're learning a fair bit of electronics that way and uh, but it's just a one-off.

You didn't really have any constraints to your design at all. You just had an idea and you used whatever Parts you uh had available either in your junk bin or what you found on uh, you know, Digi key or eBay or something to build up your circuit and you didn't really put much research into it. You just build it and it works. So I think it's much more valuable to actually design a kit or a product.

a real world product and then that really gives you. it sets. First thing it does is it sets. Uh, very targeted constraints, design constraints with which to work in.

Um, not only in terms of uh, component selection, packaging, housing. all that sort of stuff starts to come into play that you never would have got if you just design your circuit, one off and build it into your own box. One off and you put no thought into manufacturing the thing actually. Mass manufacturing the thing.

Um, got to cross the road here. Sorry, don't get run over as I rant. I'll pick that back up. So yeah, if you design a oneoff uh product, you you learn the usual stuff.

but then design a real world product. You set const straints and that's not meant something that a lot of designers actually end up doing, even sometimes their entire career. They won't actually design a product from start to finish, so they might not. Might never be involved in the housing.

They might never be involved in the specs they might never involved in. uh, you know, firmware side of things I might never be involved in user interface design handling? Uh, you know, shock testing, vibration? all that environmental stuff. uh. designing for high volume? uh, low cost component availability? There's a whole swag of things that, um, you know, really go into designing even even a very simple kit as you've seen in a little bit of in my power supply design.

Series So yeah, if design a kit or a product and set those constraints and you'll learn a hell of a lot. Because you'll find that when you, uh, start to design something like that, you might have to look through, say a dozen. You need an analog to digital converter. You look through a dozen different analog to digital converters to find one that meet your price.

performance availability, package type, power consumption, all sorts of stuff that you ordinarily wouldn't worry too much about if you designing a oneoff. So you instantly end up with, um, the ability to, um, find these alternative components. And it's And then you end up researching these parts and you look at them. You never would have found them otherwise.

It's a huge difference. and uh, then you get into of course, the housing, the construction of the thing, and the design for testing. Ah, all sorts of stuff. So yes, Shane by all means um, design a a kit, or a real world product or something like.

even if it's just an example, even if you have no intention of actually manufacturing this thing, it doesn't matter. Setting those design constraints means that you'll be pushed in certain directions and you have to design things in a certain way. Think differently and think, like often, a real world product designer and that's probably more valuable overall than just building. learning electronics by building up your circuit oneof.

So there you go. Um, I Hope I answer your question and if you like this uh segment, please give it the thumbs up and I'll do it some more. Catch you next time.