Day 20: Ask those who love!

Published in

getting technical

7 min readJul 21, 2016

First observation of the day: when you are working on a hard problem, you are much likelier to wake early to get the most hours each day to work on it.

For learning to receive special status in one’s life, it must be strongly goal-driven. The more specific the goal, the stronger one’s motivation is to learn. That said, I find hard-problem-solving to be more effective in getting my ass out of bed at 7 instead of the usual 9 than relying on anything as finicky as willpower and motivation. As with most things, a mix is better than one.

In that dark place

I’m at that place once again. That place where everything is shiny and beautiful and interesting but is also dark. Not pitch black, but so dim that I can only tell what each of the items laid out throughout the room by the faint light that bounces off one of its sides.

If someone put a gun to my head and asked me to guess every item, what they are and what they can do, I’ll probably make it a full minute before my head gets blown to non-existence. If you sat me down and showed me 100 different electronic components and fully-fleshed devices, and asked me to tell you what they were, it would be the same.

This unpleasant feeling has come to visit rather often lately. It’s more a love-hate relationship, though, because I’m set on believing that this uneasiness, which arises out of not knowing something that I want to know more thoroughly, will be the catalyst to my eventual knowledge of the subject.

Knowing that helps little. Latching onto the ability of frustration to catalyse my learning just doesn’t fly. For one, it makes my hair turn grey. Trading black hair for knowledge seems like a foolish thing. One should be able to learn without being driven mostly or solely by frustration.

In this dark place, I need to find a source of light. Something must illuminate the subjects before I’m ever able to properly study them by touching and scratching, shaking and knocking, and connecting and powering and so on.

Dark rooms of late can be illuminated with more than just the tungsten lightbulb. One can choose among many contraptions that emit light, from CFL bulbs to fluorescent tubes to LEDs. Just as many ways as there are to learn about electronics.

Textbooks were the original Edison lightbulbs. In 2016, we have better tools:

Blogs for reading other people’s experiences and learning from them
Forums for asking questions and getting answers
YouTube for watching people show and tell and learning from them
Online classes for learning through formal instruction to learn by doing

(The list is overwhelmingly digital! I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I doubt I’ll be able to fully answer that this lifetime. Is there a place for physical books after the advent of ebooks and audiobooks?)

So the question I’m finding myself asking now is this: which source of light should I seek and use?

I could read the top 100 introductory articles on electronics that show up on Google. (Ok, maybe I can’t, unless willpower-altering technology comes along.) Or I could watch 10 introductory videos on YouTube, since a picture is worth a thousand words, or recreate 20 projects on Instructables, or finish all the projects in all the Arduino and Raspberry Pi starter kits on the market.

But “which one?” is, I just realised, the wrong question to be asking when stuck in a dark room. Just grab the nearest torch to get some light in the room already! From there, you can appraise and pick things up one at a time…

Choosing a single tool isn’t just unnecessary, it is limiting. The best result is probably achieved through a combination of tools. Eventually one will feel more natural, and I imagine I’ll simply gravitate towards it in the future.

That tool is YouTube for me right now, though I’m starting to realise its limitations. (The line between education and entertainment is extremely thin with video, and presenters constantly jump across it, sometimes unaware that it diminishes its heuristic quality.)

Speaking of tool, the one I chose today for learning about motors is a combination of the official Arduino starter kit book, a few supportive members of my hardware community on (Hackware on Facebook), and some articles found through Google. The times we live in!. Our ancestors would be astonished and proud.

Deduction: an engineer’s strong suit

How much can you tell about the motor just by this picture?

Continuing from yesterday’s game of guess-what-this-motor-is-and-how-to-use-it, I read up, asked questions, and finally did something with my hands today.

I posted a simple question on the Hackware FB group that I’m in, hoping I would get at least one answer that could at least point me in the right direction to read up on:

… how do I know which pin is for what?

Within minutes, I got my first response. Then another person chipped in after a few more minutes. Person A and B started talking to each other, starting a small discussion, and my newly spawned pool of collective knowledge and resources started building up. I needed only to post a question, and be a (learning) spectator.

The lesson I can generalise from this outpouring of help is this:

If you find people who are in love with the subject that you want to learn more about, the only things left standing between you and knowledge are questions. When you ask these people, they will gladly help.

One of the commenters pointed out that the two terminals sticking out of the PCB attached to the motor are probably for the power supply (Vcc and ground). This hadn’t been immediately obvious to me before, but now, having successfully used those terminals to power the motor, I feel almost silly to not have noticed them earlier. To stay honest with myself, I doubt I would have reached that conclusion without that commenter’s help, so there’s no reason to feel silly.

The reason it’s not obvious to any non-engineer like me is because the motor PCB had a socket with nicely laid out pins in it that were used by the original vacuum robot (from which I ripped out this motor) for interfacing. There were no clips sticking out clumsily from the side, just a bunch of neatly arranged wires plugged into the socket. But to someone with a basic understanding of motors of this type (high-torque DC brush motor), it is much easier, though not exactly always easy or accurate on first guess, to deduce which subcomponent does what. From there, hacking becomes possible and fun.

Arduino Uno, a breadboard and select components, the motor and a whole bunch of wires.

By the end of the day I managed a set up with an Arduino controlling the motor, and by using the Arduino’s PWM (“pulse-wave modulation”) pins I was also able to vary its rotation speed with a ‘pot’ (short for potentiometer, a little component with a knob that changes the potential difference, also known as voltage, across two points in a circuit).

In other words (ie. plain English), I hooked up the motor to an Arduino and a 9V battery, and set it up such that by turning a knob, I could switch on the motor and vary its speed in small adjustments. When I modified the code provided by Arduino to include the pot and made it work, the rush of joy I felt was hard to describe. “Imagine what I can do now!” rang through my head. Just imagine…