Resources

Table of Contents

1. Online Tutorials
   1. Advanced Arduino tutorials
   2. Lo-fi methods to create DIY electronics
2. Video Tutorials
3. Books
   1. Electronics
   2. (More) Advanced Electronics
   3. Microcontrollers
   4. Digital Signal Processing
4. Online Tools
   1. Circuit Simulators
   2. Circuit Design Tools
5. Where to Ask Questions
6. Example Hardware Kits
7. Inspirations

---

Online Tutorials

• Adafruit’s 18-Step Learn Arduino Guide is my most recommended “getting started” guide for Arduino. Adafruit, in general, has an extensive number of online electronic tutorials—both for their own products and beyond.

• Sparkfun’s Tutorial Series. Similar to Adafruit, Sparkfun creates a large number of tutorials and videos to help the electronic/maker community (and build demand for their products).

• NYU ITP’s Physical Computing Course Website. Tom Igoe’s Physical Computing course at NYU’s ITP offers a significant amount of online tutorials such as an introductory overview of Electricity, Sensors and digital I/O. Igoe is one of the co-founders of Arduino and the author of Physical Computing and Making Things Talk

• Arduino’s Official Tutorials. Lots of tutorials from foundational concepts to explaining the built-in Arduino IDE examples

Advanced Arduino tutorials

• Nick Gammon’s Arduino blog. Nick Gammon is a popular figure and moderator on the Arduino forums and runs a helpful website on Arduino. See his Arduino Traps, Tips, and Style Guide for example.

• John Errington’s Experiments with an Arduino. Like Nick Gammon, John Errington is popular on the Arduino forums.

Lo-fi methods to create DIY electronics

• The KOBAKANT DIY Wearable Technology website by Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson has a wonderful set of resources for crafting your own electronic components, including sensors, actuators, traces, and connectors.

• Similarly, the “kit-of-no-parts” website describes multiple methods for handcrafting electronics and sensors.

Video Tutorials

• Physical Computing @ ITP/NYU. This online video series by NYU ITP’s Jeff Feddersen & Tom Igoe provides over 100 high-quality teaching videos about circuits, & Arduino

• The Learning Circuit

• EEVBlog. Perhaps the most popular EE video blogs but also generally quite advanced for beginners.

Books

I’ve gone through many electronics and microcontroller books. Here are some of my favorites. I’ve attempted to provide EBook library links whenever possible. If you click on the O’Reilly links, when the login prompt occurs, use your @uw.edu email and it should open the linked book and allow access.

Electronics

• Charles Platt, Make: Electronics, 2nd Edition, Maker Media, 2015 [UW Library EBook, O’Reilly Online]. The best ‘Intro to Electronics’ book I’ve found.

• Simon Monk, Hacking Electronics: An Illustrated DIY Guide for Makers and Hobbyists, McGraw-Hill, 2013. [UW Library EBook, O’Reilly Online]

• Judy Culkin, Eric Hagan, Make: Learn Electronics with Arduino, Maker Media, 2017 O’Reilly Online

(More) Advanced Electronics

• Paul Scherz and Simon Monk, Practical Electronics for Inventors, 4th Edition, McGraw-Hill Education, 2016. [UW Library EBook, O’Reilly Online]. This is a more advanced book, e.g., the first chapter entitled Theory is 200+ pages long.

• Michael F. Robbins, Ultimate Electronics: Practical Circuit Design and Analysis, [Online Book]. CircuitLab’s free online textbook that includes over 134 interactive schematics and simulations.

• Charles Platt, Make: Encyclopedia of Electronic Components Volume 1: Resistors, Capacitors, Inductors, Switches, Encoders, Relays, Transistors, O’Reilly, 2012. [UW Library EBook, O’Reilly Online]

• Charles Platt, Make: Encyclopedia of Electronic Components Volume 2: LEDs, LCDs, audio, thyristors, digital logic, and amplification, O’Reilly, 2015. [UW Library EBook, O’Reilly Online]

• Charles Platt, Make: Encyclopedia of Electronic Components Volume 3: Sensing Light, Sound, Heat, Motion, and More, O’Reilly, 2016. [UW Library EBook, O’Reilly Online]

• You may also want to consult the Books Worth Reading list from /r/AskElectronics

Microcontrollers

• Jeremy Blum, Exploring Arduino: Tools and Techniques for Engineering Wizardry, 2nd Edition, Wiley, 2020. This is my favorite Arduino book and assumes no previous electronics knowledge! [UW Library EBook, Wiley Online]. Interestingly, Blum was inspired to work in physical computing after taking HCI Professor François Guimbretière’s Introduction to Rapid Prototyping and Physical Computing course at Cornell.

• Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers, Thomson, 2004. UW Library Print Book

Digital Signal Processing

• Notes on Music Information Retrieval, by Steve Tjoa. An interactive textbook in Jupyter Python for music information retrieval that is highly accessible and covers introductory digital signal processing topics, including fourier transforms, feature extraction, signal segmentation, autocorrelation, and basic machine learning topics too (k-means clustering)

• Compact Primer on Digital Signal Processing, by Jack Schaelder. An interactive primer on DSP, including fourier transforms, sampling, correlation, signal representations.

• The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing, by Steven W. Smith. A free and fully comprehensive online DSP textbook

• Signal Computing: Digital Signals in the Software Domain, Michael Stiber, Bilin Zhang Stiber, and Eric C. Larson

Online Tools

Circuit Simulators

• EveryCircuit. I’ve not used this but it’s recommended by Stanford’s ‘Intro to Arduino’ course.

• CircuitLab. A popular online circuit simulator (UMD has a site license; UW does not). The Scherz and Monk book recommends this website.

• CircuitJS. A free online circuit simulator written in JavaScript.

Circuit Design Tools

• Autodesk Tinkercad Circuits. Build, code, and debug circuits and Arduino microcontrollers in an online simulator.

• Fritzing. Fritzing was the leading open-source circuit diagramming tool amongst the Maker community (and a tool I used extensively in my own teaching to create diagrams) but has struggled recently (see Future of Fritzing is Murky at Best. Evidently, there is a recent attempt to revitalize it (Is Fritzing Back?)

Where to Ask Questions

I encourage you to ask questions! There are so many people out there willing to help. Generally, however, please search your target forum before posting to see if your question has already been asked (and hopefully answered).

• StackExchange. The Arduino and Electronics StackExchange forums are extremely popular.

• Reddit. While Reddit is not generally known as a thoughtful, respectful community, the subreddits for r/arduino and r/diyelectronics communities are helpful and supportive.

• Online Forums. The most popular electronics and Arduino-based Q/A forums, include: Adafruit, Sparkfun, Arduino.cc, and EEVBlog.

Example Hardware Kits

Here are some example hardware kits (with source links) that we’ve used in our classes.

• CSE590 Ubiquitous Computing: Spring’20
• HCID521 Prototyping Studio: Winter’20
• CSE599 Prototyping Interactive Systems: Spring’19

Inspirations

Searching for project ideas or some divine epiphany on what to work on next? Check out our Inspirations.

---

Table of contents

• Inspirations
• UW Courses
• Tinkercad