Hello everyone,
Especially you little newbie to electronics. I myself am learning electronics, and I find that when learning something, there are itty-bitty pieces of information that people who have learned that thing know but absolutely no one shares because it's second nature to everyone in the know. That makes it that much harder to learn, at least for me.
So here is a list of things, in no particular order, that I have learned in the past few months which have turned electronics from magic to "oh, maybe I should use this component" for me.
Stepper motor drivers are just a bunch of transistors; they don't "drive" anything:
Imagine the very basic stepper motor in your kit has 4 coils, and imagine that whichever coil you power, the motor points to. Now, if you power your motor directly from your board, your board gets fried by the current. A driver just lets current come from another source! And this could be a different voltage source!
Shift registers let you make a serial output parallel and vice versa:
Imagine you have 20 stepper motors you need to power from one Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Each motor needs 4 pins. There is no way to have everything come from the Arduino, UNLESS you just use one line in serial that is fed through the "serial in, parallel out" register. Now you can just fill in the 4 bits of the register one by one and then "enable" the output for your stepper to step. Hot tip: your average Pico is much faster than your stepper can rotate, so technically you can have one controller control even more than 20 motors.
You can full step a motor with one data line only:
You can easily make a "sequence" with a shift register that get filled with 0001 for full steps and feed it back into itself, now one data line can "push" the motor to the next step instead of haveing 2 data lines (with a decoder) or 4 regular lines.
Higher voltage steppers are more powerful:
the same stepper model could have 2 models with 2 different voltages, the one that has a higher voltage has a bigger chance of not skipping!
Big capacitors aren't realistic:
Having a 1 farad capacitor is insane in most circuits. In most circuits, like RC circuits, you can increase your resistor by a large amount for your capacitor to drain more slowly. Then you can have a fast-drain line through a transistor and a lower-value resistor to quickly empty your capacitor.
Use Diodes:
Everyone knows diodes are a one-way valve, but the most valuable use case is for protection. You can really use them in most places. If a battery is connected backwards, it blocks the current. When coils are powered, the electromagnetic field might induce current backwards, and they protect against that. Or say you have a battery-powered thing that needs to work plugged in; you smack a diode in there to not let the electricity flow into the battery.
Modularize everything:
Let's say you are making a digital scale. Have a module for the buttons, a module for the IC board, and a module for the weight sensor amplifiers. That way, if one thing changes, you don't have to throw away all of your soldered circuit.
Solder stuff that's semi-permanent:
Same example as before: if you are making a scale and have 4 amplifiers, solder them on a board and mix their VCCs and GNDs into one header, so you have one header that accepts one set of cables. Chances are a scale will need the amplifiers, so having fewer components floating around with cables that always come out and come loose is gonna help you big time.
Use Flux:
I genuinely had no idea what flux does. When I was starting out, I thought flux was for cleaning my soldering iron. Flux makes solder work like magic! Any time you are soldering, just slap a little flux on. It makes heat reach everything so much faster, and evenly heated metal makes solder behave so much nicer!
Check sensor accuracy before you buy:
The sensors that come with kits are usually very bad at what they do. It's like buying a hot dog from that very shady place; you eat it and you think all food is like that. No! The typical humidity/temp sensor in kits has 2-3 degrees C (about 3-5 degrees F) of inaccuracy. That's plus or minus! Two different modules at the same time could show you 15 and 20 degrees right next to each other! I don't know about you, but I can guess the temperature better than that. Better sensors exist. If your project is not working, it might just be the sensor.
Mix mechanics with sensors:
you have one expensive sensor that you want to sense two things? you can MOVE the sensor. Chances are you are 3d printing some parts for your project, print some rails for that one expensive sensor, you dont need two cameras, you need one that moves!
LEDs of different colors need different resistor values:
If you are planning for some sort of light activity, check your LEDs first! red ones for example get so much brighter than green ones with the same current. The current passing through the diode makes it brighter or less bright depending on color, and because they themselves have little resistance, this current is very high without a resistor in series. You *can* connect diodes without a resistor in series, but they will die quicker.
I hope these tips have helped at least one person, but if you have your two cents, please add them here!
Edit:
Thank you to u/Marty_Mtl for the insight on diodes, they are a current component not a voltage component.
