I thought I’d share this information with the club, being HAMS I know many of you are also interested in electronics as well. There are a few good ways to increase your knowledge in this area. #1: Ask Kevin WA2FKV!! Just kidding Kevin.
There are these great kits out there Auduino, Raspberry Pi, are the one’s everyone knows about. There’s another based on the ARM Cortex M processor (Computer on a Chip, basically). They are the processors that are in almost every smartphone and tablet. Well anyways, I’m taking a free course online with edX given by instructors from the University of Texas in Austin. Since this course is lab based I decided to buy a kit that the instructors put together. The processor is on a prototype board that Texas Instruments built. The whole thing cost me $36 with shipping and includes about 14 components. You DO NOT need to buy the kit though. You can do the labs with a simulator (free also). There are about 13 labs total, 8 are needed to pass the course (I Think).
The board interfaces with your PC, comes with drivers for any latest Windows based PC, plenty of expansion options too!
It’s a good course designed for engineering students but it says you only need familiarity with programming. I’ve just started it but it seem to be covering all the computer basics, Number Systems, Memory, registers, I/O, etc.
If anything, it’s a great course to learn how a computer works at the low level.
I think there may be course that covers the other two kits I mentioned above as well. I’ve taken a few online course from different places, all very low cost ($15) or free. They all have worked out well. Every area you could possibly be interested in is taught!
Places to look are:
Udemy, edX, Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, openculture.com/freeonlinecourses, and many more!!
Well, hopefully I haven’t bored anyone to death, I’ve always found computers, radio and electronics fascinating and very exciting to learn about. If anyone has any questions, I’ll be happy to answer if I can.
73’s Alan KD2AGL