Honestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill. Spend some time working through that book. By the end of it, you'll have a better grasp of electronics than 90% of the engineers I've worked with, all who are EE bachelors/majors. It's a 3 month job at most, less if you do a dedicated hour a night. Then pick up some breadboard and parts, and build to your hearts content.

Making a working circuit is honestly very easy once you know the basics. Look inside a Made in China knockoff appliance, and you'll see that most things can be made from a couple of conponents and a microcontroller. Pull apart an old TV remote or bluetooth device, and look up the part numbers and what they do. There's not much to it. You have to remember that most of the stuff getting designed and built in South East Asia is done by people with zero qualifications. Electronics being "the thing that smart university people do" in the West is mostly a mental block, culturally constructed because people don't want their kids getting electrocuted so bombard them with constant threat of death if playing with electricity (which mostly isn't a worry anymore unless you're working with mains power).

The true discipline of Electronic Engineering is designing something that works for every eventuality and environment, with close to 100% reliability, at the very cutting edge of what is possible with the components we can afford while balancing physical and financial constraints. That's something which takes years of both academic study and industrial experience.

Before you dive too deep, check what's already available and let your tinker TODAY without having to solder anything. You can still do so, even design PCB and get them mailed to you (like I did, it's fun) but honestly spend a bit of time (and money) on CrowdSupply to see the plethora of fun and useful OSHW out there. IMHO only after having considered what's beyond the usual consumer electronics it is worth learning to build, not before.

I’m going to go against the standard advice of this book or that course.

Pick up (broken) equipment and start disassembling it to figure out how they turn A into B [1]. Go down the rabbit hole of hunting down the service manual of the thing or one of its siblings. Look at how the pcbs follow the same pattern in competing design. Look at how all the yamaha, sony, medion, … amplifier/tuners are made in the same way and learn from it. Notice that one that is costlier and has those few quircks in its design. Notice how different variations of a theme achieve the same result, but died out because the tech doesn’t scale or simply proved to be suboptimal. Try to repair your broken equipment by understanding the path that the signals and power lines follow.

Rinse and repeat a few years and you’ll get a grasp on what the innards of an unknown electronic thing looks like without opening it. Then open it and be amazed that there was a different, cheaper, simpler way to turn A into B.

All along the way you’ll experience that most educational resources aren’t actually that good at explaining, or that they follow a different school of mathematical notation, or that they’re really good at explaining this detail but the rest is missing.

Design your own pcbs. Remember that - like software - hardware design is iterative. Remember that - unlike software - hardware iterations cost money.

Hope this helps.

[1] the ways to turn A into B are rather limited and it relies heavily on electromagnetism and conservation of energy.

Forty years ago, I was on my way to college to get a computer engineering degree. I had already been programming in 6502 assembly language and was frustrated that I didn’t understand the hardware side of things as much as I understood the software side of things. Best decision I made. It allowed me to view computation as something more abstract. The barrier between hardware and software processing is artificial and can be moved one way or the other. What is CPU microcode, for instance, hardware or software? It’s really low level software that is typically burned into a ROM but is also sometimes downloaded. Even if you decide to stay with software as your primary day to day job, you’ll be comfortable talking to engineers on the other side of the line and that will help inform your understanding of what’s possible, how much it will cost to design and ship it, how long it will take, and how it will perform.

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