There are a million and one guides online but I find they tend to either be too basic or far too advanced. Can anyone recommend some thorough learning resources? Hardcopy books are a bonus.
Thanks in advance!
I cannot recommend Phil's Lab [1] enough. He has videos which take you from basically an empty sketch to ordering a finished board in around 2.5 to 3 hours. Some of the most worthwhile content I have found on YouTube to date.
Also, get a multimeter and an oscilloscope. Any oscilloscope will do probably, I have one from Amazon for 30$. For my project, it totally does the job, although you may want to invest a bit more here if you intend to use it for more advanced projects. You cannot believe how many times being able to look at a signal has helped me understand where my problem could be and what might be wrong. It has also helped me figure out what questions I had to ask. For simple projects, you are always going to get there by guessing I suppose, but why make it hard on yourself.
Aside from that, just try things. It is probably helpful to spend more time thinking when you are handling more expensive parts, so you do not burn a couple of them out because of carelessness, but also, don't overthink it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.daveyholle...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/electronic-toolbox-pro/id33915...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ee-toolkit/id391792609
I got an ad in my twitter feed, but I don't remember the name of the app. But searching for it, I found the above examples that look really good as well.
Being noob myself I can't give you too many tips and tell in honesty they come from deep experience.
But I can give you one.
Don't be bent on doing everything yourself. Working with and understanding existing circuits is a huge opportunity to learn a lot from people who have infinitely more experience at this than you.
I have discovered this when I determined to fix couple of broken devices at home. Each time, by analyzing the existing circuit, I have learned a lot about how people put things together and how features of the device can realistically look.
With the benefit of hindsight, this should have been obvious. I am not spending too much time to read other peoples' codebases to learn from them but that's because I have started learning programming some 25 years ago and by now I can solve problems for myself. But when I started out I would take every opportunity to look at some foreign code, copy it, understand how it works and I understand this has been great learning tool.
Now that I have kids (older son is 7yo) I use the same technique to teach him programming. Instead of going from first principles I show him a working program (in scratch), or somebody else creating a working program or we create a working program with me programming it, and he learns much faster how to program by seeing how something works rather than by trying to derive from first principles.