@freemo btw, toying with doing some electrical engineering work recently, wondering if you had any tips on first projects or how to get started?

seen here and there to start with your own power supply, not sure where I'd go from there though

@skells sooo.. i guess depends on where you want to go.. is your end goal to be a tinkerer focusing mostly on digital electronics (arduino sort of stuff).. or do you want to get more advanced and go for analogy and RF sort of circuits.

Also what is your goal right now, to learn the soldering side of it and just have a fun project to start with, or a project geared more towards learning how electronics work than being useful?

A powersupply is a great first project if you just want to learn some soldering, how to read schematics, and assemble something, and its useful to have. But it likely wont teach you too much about electronics. Plus you can always just take any wall wart (you likely have plenty) and use it as a power supply (something i did for the first decade of breadboarding)... so you dont really need to make one yourself (unless its something rather advanced)... regardless it is a nice entry project.

Now if you want to build something that is less about having something useful or learning soldering and more about learning how electronics work I'd start with a blinking LED from scratch either using an astable multivibrator circuit (ideally this as its transistors, diodes and caps), or from a 555 IC (this is easier and simpler to understand but a little less to learn, but both teach about capacitor timing constants).

@freemo
always been a bit baffled about RLC circuits, figure getting my hands dirty would give me better intuition as to what's going on there so blinking LED sounds like a good idea, thanks.

any good general textbooks/resources that won't hold my hand too much?

@skells thats why i asked about if you wanted to get into RF and analog... for arduino digital stuff you dont need to worry about RLC circuits or oscillations too much, but if you want to get into anything analog you do, and that can be a barrier for some.

RLC and beyond is the point in electronics where you go from simple algebra to understand everything into somewhat more complex math (either calculus, or complex numbers, eventually both for really complex circuits).

If you are familiar with complex numbers I can show you a writeup I did that shows you how to calculate circuits in a way that might help you understand whats going on in a RLC circuit.. in principle its just like a pendulum where the energy transfers between kinetic (the inductor) and potential (the capacitor)

@freemo not sure where it'll go, using Arduino stuff sounds cool/useful but I'm more drawn to analogue stuff.

complex numbers are fine, I'd appreciate a look at your write up.

@skells I will link you, but have you at least done basic DC stuff, otherwise you might be kind of confused.. like you should at a minimum know ohms law and how to apply it. Kirchoff's law too would be nice

@skells here is the writeup, its in pdf so you can download it. sorry but the certificate expired (im working on that now):

https://jeffreyfreeman.me/frequency-domain-circuit-analysis-tutorial/

@freemo awesome, thanks

@freemo awesome thanks, will let you know how it goes :)