| ▲ | Workaccount2 4 days ago |
| The juxtaposition between the cleanliness of the software and the absolute travesty of a schematic is jarring. But it still works! I applaud the author for wading into analog electronics. Pretty much everyone nowadays would just put a timer on a micro and be done in 2 minutes. No fun in that. There is something to be said about the minimal elegance of purely analog designs, and a special rewarding feeling for wrangling electrons in their native habit rather than their boxed up binary bins. |
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| ▲ | diggan 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Pretty much everyone nowadays I think it depends on the ecosystem. It's true much of the "maker" community tends to embrace whatever solution is the cheapest, fastest and easiest to get something working out the door, but on the other hand, the DIY synth community tends to be the opposite (in my experience at least), favoring simple schematics and "back to basics" building, even sometimes going as far as trying to skip any sort of prebuilt ICs. |
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| ▲ | JKCalhoun 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, for me, analog is the exciting domain — my undiscovered country. I have played with vacuum tubes as well and thoroughly enjoyed it. Transistors were, for some reason, seemingly unknowable to me. But I made a kind of "transistor playground" [1] based around Forrest Mims III book [2] and then enjoyed playing with them. [1] https://imgur.com/a/dChq4AZ [2] https://archive.org/details/forrest-mims-basic-semiconductor... Edit: actually, I had forgotten it was a transistor logic playground for I made for creating logic gates with transistors. Based on another Forrest Mims book: https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims |
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| ▲ | jabedude 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I haven't touch anything like this in a good while, how cheap could I get a simple Arduino style chip with a few gpio to drive a yellow LED in 2025? |
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| ▲ | bluescrn 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Search YouTube for '10 cent microcontroller' to learn about the absolute cheapest chips. For £3.50 you can get an ESP32 module with WiFi and Bluetooth (e.g. https://thepihut.com/products/esp32-c3-mini-development-boar...) (A regular Arduino board might still be the best choice if you're just learning/tinkering though) | |
| ▲ | alnwlsn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | For an "official" answer (programmable from Arduino IDE, genuine new chips) you can get an ATTINY202 from DigiKey or Mouser for $0.50 in qty. 1. | |
| ▲ | bombela 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have a bag of attiny13a that cost me $0.20 per chip. It is fully self contained. Just add a very small capacitor, give it from 2.8V to 5V. And then you program it the way you want. You can even program and debug it via a single pin if you wish. At this cost for a hobbyist it's just hard to beat. It can be anything you want it to be in a few lines of code. I personally write Rust for it, not Arduino C++, but it would work just the same. | | |
| ▲ | Liftyee 4 days ago | parent [-] | | What toolchain do you use to compile Rust for it? I have about had enough of undebuggable random Arduino segfaults. | | |
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| ▲ | alias_neo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You could grab any Atmega328p or similar DIL on eBay for a couple of quid, maybe less in batches. I've got dozens of them in my electronics drawers I don't really use anymore since ESP32 dev boards are so cheap and capable for home projects. | |
| ▲ | andoando 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can get a bluetooth/wifi enabled microcontroller like a Pi Pico 2 for $5 or a full on computer running linux for $15 (Pi zero 2) | |
| ▲ | the__alchemist 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Buy any dev board that includes an LED. Nordic, ST, Espressif... doesn't matter for something like this. | |
| ▲ | cluckindan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you just need it to blink at some interval, get a NE555 for a dime. Granted, you can almost get a microcontroller for that price… | | |
| ▲ | dgacmu 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You actually can: The Puya PY32 ranges from about $0.08 on up (well, $0.15 if you only want to buy 5, but the cheapest one is $0.0959 in qty 200 and $0.0676 in qty 5000+). ARM Cortex m0 in a 10-pin ESSOP-10 surface mount package: https://lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontrollers-MCU-MPU-SOC... Kind of mind-blowing. 24mhz 32-bit computer for under a dime. But you'll learn more about the analog-ish world and not need to deal with SMD if you go the 555 route. And it'll save you power vs the astable monovibrator with NPN transistors. | | |
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| ▲ | roboror 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Like $2 if you're patient |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | justaj 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I still can't get over the fact that all electronics schematics is actually in reverse and everyone is still fine with that. |
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| ▲ | the__alchemist 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Could you explain? Most of what I work with seems non-directional, except in cases like Diodes and transistors. |
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| ▲ | btbuildem 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Honestly, it's the easiest onramp for people coming from a software background. Analog circuits are HARD, but rewarding. And as you ramp up to various ICs, things start to ~~~ make sense ~~~ in a wonderful way. Oh, and also the battery life! |
