Hi Chris & the rest of the CE forum users, I’m interested in starting the journeyman course but I have a few questions if someone could offer assistance.
First off I apologise if this is covered elsewhere on the site.
What is the format of the courses, how are they delivered?
The course listing says that we will build/learn assemblies of certain projects, are the materials/components provided within the course fee, or are they an extra?
What course is best suited to building on circuit theory, I already know ohms law, kirchoffs, mesh, nodal analysis etc.
Hey @Sean, I have been working through the projects for the last couple weeks. I don’t know if it’s advertised anywhere, but the Getting To Blinky 4.0 Project is available for all, it will show you exactly how the “course” works. It is not so much a course but a handful of projects and skills that you do at your own pace, you can see the projects and skills here.
All the materials and components needed you will need to get yourself, Chris talks about what he recommends and shows you how he finds the parts and will link to ones in the videos but you are free to substitute and use different things as it makes sense to you.
@ChrisGammell will be able to say what is coming up and I don’t want to down-sell you, but as far as I can tell for now there doesn’t seem to be any difference between the Apprentice and Journeyman level, although I might be missing something there.
But beyond that, @ALeggeUp gave a great answer. The GTB 4.0 project is a good way to get a feel for what each course is like . He’s also right that the early content is similar between those two levels, but will not be for future content.
For the theory piece, we pull that in as needed. So having the background about nodal analysis, KCL, KVL is all great, but is interesting because it’s not commonly used for circuit design. It’s not that it’s bad knowledge to have (on the contrary!), it’s just that it’s not a normal part of creating real circuits. Crazy, right? So to answer your question, either of the levels and all of the projects would be suited towards your background. I would love to hear your opinion about how much that is needed when working on building devices.
As for pulling in the knowledge as needed, this is a concept called “Just In Time Learning”. When we need to cover ohm’s law, we cover ohm’s law. When we need to talk about other theory pieces, we do that right before designing it in. I talked about this at a conference two years ago:
What if it is a topic that takes a long time to learn? I took a look at KCL (I assum it is this?) and the math seemed kind of daunting. So what happens if it takes me a long time to learn a concept?
Are you asking about “keeping up with the class”? I think this may have been an issue in earlier iterations of CE, but the current incarnation is self-paced so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Yep, agree with that. The only thing that is limiting is how fast you might want to finish a particular project. But if you want to do it right and take the time to learn the depths of particular concept, that’s not a problem.