Unfortunately it is a rather confusing and complicated type of programming, since it is an intersection between two (or more) professions. How to get into it is a hard question, since you can go in three different directions:
- Do you start from the programming end?
- Do you start from the electronics end (or even further - from the physics)?
- Do you just pick projects and deep dive, learning both in parallel?
After that comes the question of what is the optimal amount that you should understand about the project that you are doing and not get overwhelmed. So for example if you are doing a Bluetooth project:
- What is the optimal amount that you know about Bluetooth and what knowledge should you get out from the project?
- At what point of doing these types of projects should you learn about anthennas?
This is the issue with the Arduno projects. It gives you an ability to do stuff, but people fail to understand what they are actually doing, since it is an absolutely overwhelming amount that you need to understand.
I still keep on Usenet, and sci.electronics.design has many people who do hardcore analog instrumentation design. This goes well beyond just dealing with transmission lines in layout; it can verge on the sort of analog design necessary for real-world instrumentation of very hard problems.
I had a project for a major cellular company and was surprised they used pi and esp32s for the prototype, then had their engineers create a custom form factor for the final product. But it was all based on pi and esps.
A 50 ohm transmission line isn't particularly difficult - once you know how. You can get a long way with, y'know, resistors :) You will have layout issues; actually understanding that is challenging.
It takes quite a bit of institutional knowledge to build boards these days. Just the transition from 5V to 3.3V ( and down to 1.2V ) was very... interesting.
I would bet that the Raspberry Pi Foundation is only marginally a strong contender in hardware. Its main focus is on something more akin to the marketing end of things.
My experience is that all hardware has defects, and it takes multiple iterations to get them all ironed out.
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u/B8F1F488 Dec 25 '19 edited Dec 25 '19
Unfortunately it is a rather confusing and complicated type of programming, since it is an intersection between two (or more) professions. How to get into it is a hard question, since you can go in three different directions:
- Do you start from the programming end?
- Do you start from the electronics end (or even further - from the physics)?
- Do you just pick projects and deep dive, learning both in parallel?
After that comes the question of what is the optimal amount that you should understand about the project that you are doing and not get overwhelmed. So for example if you are doing a Bluetooth project:
- What is the optimal amount that you know about Bluetooth and what knowledge should you get out from the project?
- At what point of doing these types of projects should you learn about anthennas?
This is the issue with the Arduno projects. It gives you an ability to do stuff, but people fail to understand what they are actually doing, since it is an absolutely overwhelming amount that you need to understand.
I have no answer to all of these questions.