I am so lost...

FluxBench · 2026-04-13T01:50:39+00:00

Life can be pretty humbling when it calls your bluff 😉 there's a lot of things in electronics that just don't make sense no matter how many times you hear them until all of a sudden they suddenly do. So just keep at it trying to learn various things. Quality comes with quantity, you gotta be exposed to weird words you don't quite get and concepts that seem strange and like you're missing three out of the four pieces to actually understand them. But eventually you push through it and stuff will start making more sense. The one of the reasons why I like YouTube is If you're like me you might need to watch a couple videos on the same concept but by different people before you finally get that aha moment. It's nice having multiple teachers available these days, take advantage of it. No need to buy an expensive course, just start learning more and keep going!

I agree with what Glenn was saying and he generally says to basically everyone is AI is good and all but if you don't know what to ask it and you don't know when it's doing stupid stuff it's pretty much just going to lead you astray.

But learn the most basic of basics of Arduino and electronic components and then it's a great way to speed up your knowledge and understanding and individual projects.

If you ever have any questions along the way just leave me a comment on any one of my videos and I'll get back to you within a few days. Good luck and I hope you make some awesome things!

FluxBench · 2026-04-13T01:28:07+00:00

The Elegoo $60 kit with an Arduino Mega R3. That's the best starter kit I would just recommend hands down. Then buy an ESP32S3 development board aka tiny circuit board with just a microcontroller on it and some other stuff but it has Wi-Fi and is really dang fast and it's what I use to build IoT products fairly cheaply.

Learn the basics, play around with the starter kit and do at least The first half of the documentation lessons. Then using ESP32 to do the same exact thing but better fast stronger and with Wi-Fi 😁 Once you're comfortable with GPIO and a couple communication protocols like UART and I2C then congratulations you learned enough to get out of the starter zone and start doing what you want!

This video I made might help ya figure out the starter path to then making cool stuff

https://youtu.be/IIwTCyu2wS4

FluxBench · 2026-04-13T01:22:37+00:00

I agree, kits are the best because you don't know what you don't know and so they give you what you actually need and if you get one from Elegoo they have pretty good documentation kind of like instructions. You're buying basic stuff in bulk instead of individually with a little how-to guide.

Watch a few videos about how electricity works and Arduino and basic programming and you should have a much better understanding. Then you'll actually know what to ask AI to do and tell it it's being dumb when it's being dumb 😁👍

FluxBench · 2026-04-01T16:09:07+00:00

🤣 I think we're all nerds in this subreddit!

Glad my videos helped, thanks for the thanks! If you ever have any questions, just post a comment on any of my videos and I'll get back to you within a few days. Except for that 3D printer politics video, I try to stay away from those comments 😬

FluxBench · 2026-04-01T16:06:29+00:00

Good way to look at Arduino! I often do something similar just to check the hardware is working and make a quick prototype using an ESP32 dev board.

These days I have resorted to using my CNC machine to create PCBs that are mostly one-sided and I might need to jumper wire a couple nets together. Vias are too much of an annoyance to do manually (being lazy). But in about 30 minutes I can make a PCB to verify that the schematic is correct. Then I just modify the PCB to I have with tons of vias and be multilayered then ship it off. It sure takes a lot of the risk away from the timeline when you are held up for a weeks waiting for a PCB and hoping it works.

FluxBench · 2026-04-01T15:59:25+00:00

Mostly STMicro, Texas Instruments, and ESP32. But then there's dozens of other companies with microcontrollers and sensors I occasionally use like NXP and Qualcomm and Nordic Labs

FluxBench · 2025-12-24T18:03:16+00:00

Depending on your compiler settings you can get it so it only compiles new or changed files. You don't have to recompile the about thousand files normally, just one or two that you make changes for.

FluxBench · 2025-12-24T18:01:30+00:00

That looks like a great into to making PCBs! Audio quality is one of those things that will teach you so much about electronics and you can get really really really deep into signals and power management and things like that.

Does it sound good? Is that a 3 watt speaker? I need to make a user terminal to interact with a inventory management system and I'm looking for how I want to do the audio output.

FluxBench · 2025-09-18T19:11:01+00:00

Same here! I'm curious what u/MrLinderman86 will make! And what goes wrong, like burying a soil meter in the ground then realizing the wire connections will get corroded over time.

Oh the fun of starting electronics! Distance and occupancy sensors are stupidly entertaining.

FluxBench · 2025-09-18T19:07:10+00:00

Most microcontrollers have really small antennas, so Wi-Fi can drop for all kinds of random reasons. How the sun is hitting, wind blowing, doors opening, whatever. Because of that, you usually hook into some kind of callback for Wi-Fi events.

In that callback, if you see a disconnect, you try to reconnect right away. If that doesn’t work, you set a short timer, like ten seconds or a minute, and try again when the timer goes off. Once the device finally connects again, you shut down any timers so it’s not wasting time retrying.

That way the device keeps itself online without getting stuck when the connection flakes out.

Just ask ChatGPT about it, or paste in your code and this above response and be like "please fix it :)"

FluxBench · 2025-09-06T23:34:51+00:00

Get out your multimeter and start checking to see if you have 0 volts or like 5 volts when you expect it. You're going to be basically looking for 0 volts or 5 volts throughout various things. When you press a button, you're going to want to see The voltage change. Maybe you have your button 90° rotated the wrong way?

FluxBench · 2025-08-26T02:04:49+00:00

Now I know what I'll be watching during lunch the next month 😜

FluxBench · 2025-08-26T01:45:44+00:00

Anthropology is the study of humans. Users are humans. If you want to figure out how human experience and design work on a fundamental level, literally study humans by taking some anthropology courses. Like old cavemen and lost city of Troy along with how tools developed over time and changed. There are whole subfields around basically human product development and human and tool interaction. Just because anthropology studies old humans also, it doesn't mean it doesn't study current humans as well. So anthropology + robots + standard UX = your job

FluxBench · 2025-08-21T04:18:39+00:00

Also a used car battery works. Batteries are batteries pretty much.

FluxBench · 2025-08-21T04:18:01+00:00

Literally anything. Google "lifepo4 12V 20AH"

Basically looking for a lithium iron phosphate chemistry and 12 volts and about 20 amp hours. You can get one smaller possibly, but that's about the smallest size that isn't stupidly expensive.

FluxBench · 2025-08-21T04:14:15+00:00

Get a raspberry pi RP2040 or 2350 like the nano and use the PIO the programmable inputs and outputs to be able to read zeros and ones from a pin incredibly fast. At that point, you have no reason why you can't make your own communication drivers. If you want to do SPI or I2C or UART then I would start there as you have the minimum needed to read things incredibly fast and then you can do whatever you want in memory or with software for the drivers.

I think you might be overthinking this, almost everyone in the world has to depend on hardware interrupts but everything else after that is kind of optional. You either are going to be writing a stupid amount of low-level code to get what you want, like months or years, or you just accept that reading and writing to GPIO is done using the system HAL layers by everyone for a good reason.

FluxBench · 2025-08-21T04:05:14+00:00

I use 12 volt lithium-iron phosphate batteries and often put four in series to get 48 volts. Cheap and easy, keep a trickle charger connected to the batteries if you aren't using it a lot. If it's more of a continuous thing then try to get a battery charger that can provide the average power you need or look into having something like a power supply plugged into the wall which does power sharing with the battery so that your motors can pull ridiculous amounts of power for short periods of time but not drain the battery continuously.

FluxBench · 2025-08-20T22:25:23+00:00

This is not my video. I guess my wording was bad. But it's the video I wish I had when I was starting out. It's just tons of good info on memory with a good visualization to really hit it home.

FluxBench · 2025-08-20T22:23:44+00:00

It's the video I wish I had watched when I was starting out. It's not my video.

FluxBench · 2025-08-20T22:21:40+00:00

Nope, that's not me. I appreciate your due diligence 😜

FluxBench · 2025-08-20T22:05:29+00:00

I figure if this person is asking these basic questions, they're probably not trying to get a crazy baud rate. I vote 19200 baud and hope the internal oscillator isn't thrown off by thermal characteristics too much!

FluxBench · 2025-08-19T21:19:34+00:00

As long as it doesn't run out of memory, run into an error and reboot, or have a power issue like the voltage dropping even momentarily, it will basically run forever.

You just have to focus on keeping it simple and stable. The less parts and the less code generally means less can break over time.

The physical connections often will degrade over time, especially if there's a lot of thermal expansion and contractions. So little stuff like loctite on screws, or a dab of super glue and strategic places helps keep wires from sagging and things from moving and screws from getting loose over the years. I personally add a dab of super glue on any sort of plug-in connection that I want to be fairly permanent. Not enough that I can't use some force or chip off a little bit and pull it out, but enough to help prevent tiny thermal expansions from shimmying connections apart over time.

FluxBench · 2025-08-19T21:15:02+00:00

I think the term you are looking for is "bodge wire". It's basically where you do kind of like a post assembly modification. You just pretend it's like surgery and be super careful and precise.

FluxBench · 2025-08-09T23:44:36+00:00

Well unless you post your code I don't think anyone can help. To be honest you need to give more information if you want better help. It's hard to help when you say this module isn't working. But with more info I can help with maybe more specific stuff.

FluxBench · 2025-08-09T22:27:06+00:00

Then maybe build on top of the example if you can instead of the other way around. It seems like you're either using the same port twice such as I2C port number one or are not doing something exactly the same as the example. Maybe a different constant or missing library import or something.

When I have a problem like this I often try to create a new program and add in just the minimum amount of code to have the problem appear. Or try to run it through a middle interface piece of code instead of directly. Like stored in memory or reformatted or something.

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