Thanks! I'm not familiar with knobular music devices (like hi-fi stuff?) Glad I can help, and if you have any suggestions on what other material to add, just let me know!
That's unfortunate! If you know any students who would be interested in my developing an online hardware engineering course, just send me an email at [email protected]. Thanks!
For simple board design projects, I recommend starting with a microcontroller, such as AVR (as used by the Arduino). The chip manufacturer usually provides reference boards as a starting point / cheat-sheet for your design.
If you'd like to go deep into embedded system design, I've also accumulated all of notes at: http://bringuplabs.com/guide/smartphone/
I'm actually looking for students to give feedback on this curriculum format, so feel free to message me if you have any questions!
Thank you! If we can get traction, we definitely want to let the community build guides of their own, while leveraging the topics covered in existing guides. I'm hoping this becomes a low-overhead format for experienced engineers to share their accumulated knowledge to students.
What's a bit surprising to me is that Chinese manufacturers already know how to do it. They're becoming excellent at manufacturing, while it's become a bit of a lost art over here in the USA. I was lucky that my Caltech college curriculum included so many hands-on projects -- I'm under the impression that many EE majors spend most of their time in IC design. Can any current EE college students confirm?
iPhone was definitely a team effort, so fortunately I had access to the top engineers at Apple to guide my personal development. The difficulty wasn't really learning the material itself, but rather figuring out what was worth learning.
As for equipment, there's workplaces like Hacker Dojo that have community resources, and in a pinch you can rent equipment from places like MetricTest. Oscilloscopes are pretty reasonable, but it's mainly the RF equipment that gets into BMW price territory.