A hands-on course
Understanding circuits well enough to build your own home-automation gadgets and guitar-effect pedals — with intuition, not heavy math.
Short lessons, each with one concrete win, built on trusted sources and the water-pipe way of thinking about electricity. Read them in order; come back to the glossary any time.
Voltage, current, and resistance — and why your LED needs that resistor.
A schematic is a map — and how to lay it down on real breadboard holes.
Predict what a circuit does at a glance — no math, just two patterns.
3.3V vs 5V, pin current limits, common ground — how not to fry your board.
The floating-pin trap, and pull-up/pull-down resistors that fix it.
The transistor as a switch, and the flyback diode that protects it.
The home-automation payoff — with safety front and center.
Read values & ratings, and meet the voltage divider.
Types, polarity, and the decoupling-cap habit that fixes flaky projects.
A knob your board can read — your first analog input.
One-way-valve tricks: flyback and reverse-polarity protection.
Orient any chip and look up exactly how to use it.
What's on your board, and Arduino vs ESP32.
The three ways a pin talks — and the PWM trick.
Connect almost any sensor or display module.
Spin a motor both directions and control its speed, safely.
Precise position and repeatable motion control.
Turn temperature, light, and motion into signals — closing the loop.
Connect your ESP32 to your home network reliably.
Control and monitor your gadget from any browser.
Publish/subscribe: the language smart-home devices speak.
Expose your gadget as an entity and automate it. The home-automation finish line.
The audio mindset, and your guitar → breadboard → amp rig.
Make an AC signal live on a single 9 V supply — the key analog trick.
Make the waveform bigger — the engine under every dirt pedal.
Where dirt comes from — soft vs hard clipping, diode flavors.
Sculpt treble and bass with a capacitor and a resistor.
Echo, chorus, tremolo — time-based effects and their chips.
The blueprint: how a dirt pedal's stages fit together.
DC volts, continuity, resistance, diode test — see the invisible.
A real classic dirt pedal on your breadboard, measured stage by stage.
A calm, systematic method — voltage checks, signal tracing, the audio probe.
Why it hums or hisses — and the fixes that quiet it down.
Glossary → Symbol cheat-sheet → Component field guide → Signals & buses → Connectivity cheat-sheet → Guitar effects building blocks → Bench skills cheat-sheet → Rules of thumb →