I’ve been programming computers in one form or another since I was about 13 but it took me almost 30 years to dip my toes into the world of electronics.

Part of this was just a lack of interest. Software always struck me as somewhat magical in a way that wires and electrical components just didn’t. My early programming interests were bound up with esoteric programming languages and hacker culture, which had a sort of mystique that I didn’t see in electronics.1

Part of it was probably also fear of getting electrocuted. Learning that you actually cannot be electrocuted by a car battery was a big turning point in my comfortability with electronics (though make sure you don’t accidentally bridge the terminals with a dropped wrench). You can’t really hurt yourself with computers, but with electronics my lack of knowledge bred fear: might it somehow be possible for an LED to explode and send shards of glass into my eyes? If I wire something backwards will it melt a hole in my table or spew toxic fumes into the air?

Learning some electronics basics has helped me overcome those fears, and has also proved surprisingly useful (and fun!) in fixing everyday household items that I would previously just have thrown out.

Car stereo

I’ve written about this before here. This was my first significant “real world” electronics project. It had some of the characteristic challenges of software projects (manual is wrong, things are mislabeled) and some that are unique to the physical world (parts are missing or present in excess quantity, you open up a panel and discover you don’t actually have time to finish this right now but need to be able to drive the car tomorrow, so you have to hurriedly put everything back in place, no ability to git commit -m'wip' and come back to it later).

Skills required:

  • ability to make sense of confusing instructions
  • soldering
  • confidence

Noise-cancelling headphones

The battery on my Soundcore Life Q20 noise-cancelling headphones started to die after a few years of use, and couldn’t hold a charge any more. I can’t remember how much I paid for them originally, but well under $100. Getting them professionally repaired would almost certainly have cost more than their original price.

But armed with a very basic understanding of voltage and amperage, I was able to find a compatible lithium polymer battery. In the end, I had to purchase a few because it was hard to find one that was the correct dimensions. I needed 3.7 volts, and while the original was something like 500 mAh, I think the one I ended up using was 550 or 600 mAh. Turns out that’s fine, you aren’t going to fry your device with a bit more mAh, just have a battery that lasts a bit longer.

Skills required:

  • soldering
  • basic understanding of voltage, amperage, how consumer devices use batteries
  • confidence

Handheld fan

These are popular in my household, but are generally not well made. The joints between the handle and fan head can eventually cause the wires to come loose after prolonged use, rendering the unit unreliable or entirely inoperable.

But it turns out that is a very easy fix, if you are able to disassemble the unit. Just open it up, use a multimeter to figure out where the connection problems are, and then either re-solder something or replace a bit of wire. Since you are generally working with just one or two AA batteries in this case, there isn’t much of a risk of using the wrong gauge wire if you do need to replace it, just pick one that is insulated and at least as thick as the ones currently in use.

Skills required:

  • soldering
  • multimeter use
  • basic understanding of voltage, amperage, wire gauge and insulation
  • confidence

Kids microscope

We brought out the microscope to see if we could get a close-up look at one of the planaria that pop up from time to time in our freshwater shrimp tank, and discovered that the light wasn’t working any more. At first we thought it might be the old batteries which showed signs of corrosion, but still no dice after swapping them out.

I wondered if it might be something in the battery enclosure, so we clipped the wires off (could always solder them back on if we wanted to) and connected them to a multimeter but still couldn’t see any connectivity through the circuit.

We disassembled it further, and eventually found that the light source was just a simple white LED. (If this had been me a few years ago, I would certainly not have made it to this point, but if I somehow had, I would have probably stopped here, wondering if there was something special about this LED, etc whereas now when I saw it, I was like “ah, just an off-the-shelf white LED”.)

Here we began testing it with a 9V battery just because it’s easy to connect alligator cables to. Again, had this been me a few years ago, I would have thought “well you can’t just start using 9V, it calls for two AA! Batteries are a mystery! What if it explodes?” Now I knew that a) it would probably be fine, the LED would just be a bit brighter, b) if the LED was overwhelmed by the voltage I have a bunch more sitting in my drawer that I could just swap in.

Anyway, we found that the LED was fine, the wires around it were fine, it was just something to do with a loose connection when the wires were pulled through the base. I didn’t figure out exactly where the problem was, but don’t need to. Now if we want to use the microscope, we can just alligator clip it up to a 9V battery. Looks janky (aka cool) but works fine.

Skills required:

  • multimeter
  • basic understanding of batteries and LEDs
  • confidence

Learning this yourself

If you have any interest, I highly recommend investing the dozen or two hours it takes to achieve this meager level of skill and confidence.

It is additionally a great way to spend time with your kid, teach them about electronics and electricity, and also provide a little lesson in sustainability and reducing your ecological footprint through mending rather than discarding. (Though you have to make sure that if you get bit by the electronics hobby bug you don’t just undo any such ecological benefits by buying a bunch of plastic electronic shit you don’t really need, ahem of course I would never be so foolish.)

  • By far the most valuable resource for me has been Charles Platt’s book Make: Electronics (third edition) which I bought along with this kit from ProTechTrader.
  • I love these articles from William J Beaty on electricity. As an amateur I cannot vouch for their accuracy, but they seem to generally have a good reputation on line.
  • Get an Arduino (or similar, e.g. Elegoo) starter kit. These come with a bunch of components and various mini projects to try. They do involve some programming. Everything is pretty well spelled out for you, but still if you have zero background in programming this may be difficult/intimidating.
  • On Youtube, Styropyro and Electroboom are entertaining but also informative.

  1. One of the first languages I learned was perl, and the recent essay Perl’s decline was cultural ironically captures some of what attracted me to that culture as a youngster. ↩