A hobby a long time coming...

I have always been interested in electronics but have never felt that I have had the understanding that would allow me to work on projects of my own design - I have always copied existing designs having fumbled my way through breadboards, wafer and season cards back in the satellite hacking days.

Hopefully that is about to change. I've enrolled in Circuits and Electronics at MITx - MIT University's beta  online subject (free). On completing the course students receive a certificate and hopefully an understanding of basic electronics.

It will be an interesting challenge for. Year 12 Physics is a distant memory and I will be doing some preparation via the Khan Academy before the course starts. Maths at an advanced level is always something I have struggled with as well so it will be interesting to see how I go.

To help on the hobby front and possibly with the course I have ordered a Sparkfun Electronics Start Kit for  Arduino from Robot Gear (an Australian distributor). The kit contains a whole bunch of buttons, LEDs, wires, sensors and the smallest breadboard I have ever seen. I've been following the Arduino project for a while now and I'm dipping a toe in.

I'm going to work through the tutorials to try and get a good understanding of the Arduino. So far a couple of the video tutorials I have watched have given great explanations of what is actually happening in terms I am familiar with - i.e "Electricity is lazy, it won't go through the resistor if it doesn't have to".

I've also ordered a UNI-T 61D multimeter which I bought from EBay from a seller in Hong Kong. I watched a couple of video reviews online and this one is apparently very accurate and has all of the features I'll ever need.

Multimeters appear to be something that people have for life, so I thought I would buy a midrange one at a decent price.