Microcontrollers: Getting Started

Woz is a national treasure, may his joy and enthusiasm never dim.

You passed the Arduinos at Micro Center.
Their mini form-factor Microcontrollers, the Arduino Nano, preceeded the Pi Pcos by more than 10 years. They also have models that use the RP2040.

I thought red shirt Jeff was mischievous, meanwhile blue shirt Jeff is here teaching us all how to blow stuff up.

this has the vibes of some kind of IEDs 101 class 😂😂😂

You know it's gonna be good when Red Shirt Jeff makes a cameo in the preview image

I started getting into micro controllers because one day I had a problem and while searching for a solution microcontrollers came up in the search.. one rabbit hole dive later and now I use microcontrollers and stepper motors to drive the gauges in my old vehicles. (50s & 60s)

I can’t wait until I live near a Microcenter (they open the Phoenix store next month).

I had a simllar kid's project board. I think we only did one thing with it. A crystal radio of some sort. I think it was 1975ish.

My career began programming Motorola 68HC11's in several variants. The best of times and so much fun!

Should have mentioned that popped caps smell worse than rotten eggs.

Jeff builds a smart detonator just in time for the Fourth of July!

People in Japan can checkout Marutsu, it sell everything from small resistors to a very big logicboard

Many years ago - maybe '72 or so - I got a toy for Christmas that was laughingly called a computer. It was a large plastic box with a dozen or so tall slides on the front. The sides had jacks and there were short cables you could plug into the jacks. You might laugh but you could create both AND or OR circuits, and with a dozen slides you could do slightly more advanced logic. I think you could even do a NOT since these sliders did actually slide and that changed the wiring behind the scenes. It could have probably implemented a half-adder.

Years later I realized this was a very basic relay computer. We've forgotten that this is what drove the earliest automatic elevators. They're like cog-based logic - something that was a lot more powerful than we think... but which could never do anything else.

This didn't lead to a lifelong passion with computers - I was a math and physics major in college and had minimal interaction with computers since they weren't really available to us until I was in grad school.

But it's a great answer when people ask "what was your first computer?".

FWIW there was also a Radio Shack toy CPU introduced in the late 70s or maybe '80. It was weird since it went to the other extreme - I'm sure it was an accurate representation of a mainframe CPU but that was far beyond the target audience. Think of jumping into Ben Eater's discrete TTL logic computer series for someone who just wants to know a little bit about a raspberry pi.

(The worst "other extreme" has to be a math book I found in a bargain bin in an outlet store. It said something like "Introduction to Algebra" and had large comic-ish numbers on the front. It looks like something you would get a struggling middle-school student. I peeked inside - and immediately bought a copy since it was actually a pretty good undergraduate introduction to number theory. I feel so bad for the parents who were mislead, and the kids who were even more traumatized when they saw the content and thought they were expected to understand it. I'm sure I still have it... somewhere.)

Good grief. I couldn’t see where the LED was until I watched this on a bigger screen. Red/green color blindness is inconvenient at times. I wish product designers would take it into account. Dare to dream.

Soooo good!! Thank you! I am getting my son into microcontrollers. This is great!

now how do I control one with my T deck plus and meshtastic

hey those project boards from radio shack was awesome!!!!

Science Fair 30 in 1, I had one in the UK circa 1980 ;)

- You can't do that here I'm sorry
+ But this is a very little cap.. Oh whatever..

I picked something to tinker with 20 years ago and I haven't stopped since. Maybe I need a new hobby. I'll check out microcenter.

PicoBrick. Absolutely awesome idea BUT ! ...the price is absolutely insane.

Follow up video suggestion - workflow tips when doing all this on a pico, breadboard , and personally chosen components instead of buying a product.

I was wondering why, in a Jeff Geerling video titled "Microcontrollers: Getting Started," the thumbnail featured the magickest of smoke as if it was about to have an Electroboom cameo or something. XD

I'm considering a little, local "micro controller school" for lonely adults. The city got some gathering places. Maybe I'm just thinking about myself and need a friend or two.

My first experience with electronics was a Dick Smith (Aussie Tandy equivalent) 150 projects Funway into electronics kit back in the early 1980s… built a crystal radio and tuned in to “eye of the tiger”. 😂

Excellent job Jeff. Thanks

When I see magic smoke, I know my work is done.

Exploding hydrogen, you say? Maybe SpaceX needs to watch this video. 😉 (j/k) 👍

I work with machines that house dozens of relays every day. They're so much fun to work with and I enjoy maintaining them.

Never breathe the magic smoke.

"Capacitor smoke! Don't breathe this!"

I wonder if your dad’s old workbench still exists and if it were to exist today, did it change over time? It’s always interesting to see someone’s electronics workbench to see what equipment / parts they have 😊

You want to get a guaranteed pop? Use tantalum caps in reverse polarity. Though you might get a fireball as well.

That's a really neat system to introduce people (not just kids) into coding. I had a Tandy project kit back in the day, I didn't go the hardware route as a career but I remember it fondly for stoking my engineer brain.

In todays episode, Jeff creates a fake home security system, where if you walk in front of a sensor it pops a capacitor like a gun going off.

I've seen comments that "microcontrollers are cheaty" especially in retro computing circles. And while that's true for simple things like flashing LEDs, microcontrollers are absolutely NOT easy when you're compiling custom firmware and dealing with library conflicts, trawling through code to figure out what's wrong, breaking out hardware debuggers, trying to figure out if the hardware even supports the pin assignments you want.......I'm not saying it's impossible but it certainly isn't cheaty. It's also common to see "[insert microcontroller] is too powerful because it could emulate the retro CPU it's attached to", which is particularly bizarre to say if an emulator doesn't even exist. It's like there's an assumption that emulators are easy to make.....lol!!

Kids will be kids, when I was working at Lenkurt Lab we used to fry resisters and blow capacitors when, the dungeons and dragons guys were playing their board fantasy games. Th8s is way before cell phones.

Shit ad. Disappointed

I remember in college electronics night classes we would take what we called a suicide cord (NEMA 1-15 plug on one end and allegator clips on the other) that would connect to an electrolytic capacitor and then plug it in. We ended up putting holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles.

Great video on micro controllers, but turning a light on and off or something other than just blowing up capacitors would have been better. This is up there with those putting thermal paste on the socket under their CPU, just pointless.

Hey MicroCenter, if you're listening. Please please please open a store in Salt Lake. We have Silicon Slopes just begging for a MicroCenter.

This reminds me of pcduino.... Are those still a thing?

What annoys me with the "switches" explanation how computers work is that that does not do anything. Only when you combine two relais (or whatever tech), you get "logic". That's what kept me from understanding computers as a child way too long. If they'd show you the application of two relais in an AND, NOT, or OR configuration, I think many people's figurative bulb above their heads would switch on. (pardon the pun)

Be careful, if you explode too many capacitors, your eyebrows will grow together.

My microcontrollers II class in college was one of my favorite classes. We started on the Motorola 68000 in Microcontrollers I but moved to a PIC 28 pin DIP in II. For some reason, I was great at programming machine language code. For our final project in the class, we had to build a huge breadboard project that was 1500 lines of machine code. It had an LCD, 12 key input pad, digital inputs, digital outputs, analog inputs the whole enchilada. I did a scrolling menu for the project on the LCD and I was the only one in my class that finished the final project. It was a paradigm shift of what you could do with microcontrollers at the time because of the flexibility of the PIC microcontrollers (circa 2000).

looks like its based on scratch 3, very cool!

So much space in that shop and so few people! Not like the tiny shops in Akiba at all...

Why not switch your camera to 24/30/60 and rejig in post? i mean the screen designers could also add a small chip knowing their product will be filmed and reviewed. it's insane we have this.