Advanced Hobbyist video idea question.

Hi all,

I'm thinking of doing a series of "Advanced Arduino Hobbyist" videos about designing circuits around microcontrollers at an advanced hobbyist level, including making custom boards (or using perfboards), using different microcontroller architectures, using more advanced IDEs for programming and even making one's own tools, whilst still being able to use whatever parts of the Arduino architecture goodness which are useful for you.

I want to see if there's actually interest for such videos - i.e. how many people in the community are at the stage and have the want to do advanced or more permanent circuits that go beyond what can be done within a fully Arduino environment, for example to use different microcontrollers than the more traditional ATmegas (for extra processing power to use in things like AI and sound synthesis, because of their extra capabilities or maybe to do something different), to make devices which are smaller in size, because the software that you need to develop is quite complex and hard to make in Arduino IDE alone, to have a device be battery powered without quickly draining the batteries, because one wants to make several of the same device and using parts is way cheaper than using multiple full hobbyist boards, because you want to try something different, because you just like to know how to do it from the ground up yourself (guilty!) and so forth.

These videos are meant to be done in a "teach a person to fish" style that teaches people some foundational stuff and how to figure things out when they're trying to design their own circuits, rather than being a bunch of videos with "circuit recipes" - I want to share with others what I've learned about figuring out what and how to do something, not tell them what to do, my expectation being that others can use it to more easily be able to freely go their own way, including to do things I myself haven't learned how to do.

In the picture you can see examples of the kind of level I'm talking about:

• On the left it's a normal Arduino Uno board that receives data via Bluetooth to control a motor. This is a technology testbed for a remote-controlled car which is to be controlled from a tablet. The interesting bit in there is that the H-Bridge through which the Arduino can control the speed of the motor, both forward and in reverse, is a homemade board, but beyond that it's a pretty standard hobbyist Arduino circuit.
• On the middle is a Battery Weather Station. Same microcontroller as the Arduino Uno (an ATmega328p) but it's by itself on a perfboard with only the needed stuff rather than a Uno board with all the bells and whistles: it's a simpler circuit (though a tiny bit more complicated to load the program into it), smaller (could've been much smaller if done a proper circuit board and SMD components), cheaper and, most importantly, those 3xAAA batteries can last about 2 years whilst merely the power led in the Arduino Uno board would kill them in a few weeks. It's still Arduino software inside, talking to common periphal boards that one uses for Arduino projects and using software libraries made on top of Arduino, but the bits of Arduino that just got on the way or were not needed (the board, the bootloader, USB support) are not there, mostly to save on power consumption so that the batteries last a long time.
• On the right it's a test baseboard for an STM32 processor (the red board, the stuff behind is something else, for testing a DAC), specifically an STMF042F6P6 in a version which is a 20 pin SMD chip (the smallest of all). The chip has USB support built-in and is a 32 bit ARM architecture microcontroller, so something quite different from that ATmega328p in the Uno. I just bought the chip and soldered it to a TSSOP20 adaptor board along with the needed caps (smd ones, in what looks like blobs of solder on both sides) and stuff, and it's fully functional including the USB and currently loaded with a program that will make your mouse mad if you connect it to a PC ;). Interestingly enough there is Arduino for this family of chips (though I myself will have to create a "variant" configuration matching this specific chip) in the form of the stm32duino Arduino core.

For the videos the idea is to start with an overview of what is Arduino as an architecture (i.e. cores, bootloader, hardware, IDE) then going towards how you can keep on using some parts of it whilst using something else for other bits, with videos about using more professional programmer-style IDEs (for example PlatformIO + Visual Studio Code), using Arduino without an Arduino board (aka custom boards), using peripherals without buying an "arduino board" with it, using other microcontrollers and microcontroller architectures (ATtiny, ESP8266/32, SMD32) and the kind of stuff one needs to learn around that (power supply and regulation, use of decoupling capacitors, chip programmers and so on), most of which turns out to be a lot simpler than it might seem at first.

The idea is to stick to digital circuits and what people can do with microcontrollers and Arduino, only touch the analog electronics world were it impacts the digital one (for example, to explain the need and workings of decoupling capacitors, which are what makes mosts boards with microcontrollers seem a complex mess of capacitors even though their use is quite straightforward).

Whilst I'm thinking mostly hardware, I might also go into software if people are interested, though that is quite a big domain if one goes into things like the Android App in the Tablet to control the remote controlled car which will come from that project on the left or server-side software with which your ESP hardware can communicate.

Whilst I have a degree as an EE, it was taken before embedded processors were a thing and I've never actually worked as an EE (rather I've worked as a software developer), and since about a year I've rediscovered the fun in electronics and been a hobbyist doing Arduino, all the while having the benefit of all that fundational knowledge in electronics from my degree to help me understand and learn faster. My hope is that, given my background, I will be able to explain the building blocks and share the principles I've learned as hobbyist who does understand some engineering concerns and the reasons for some basic building blocks on the hardware and software side - in other words, advanced knowledge whilst still a hobbyist.

So how does this sound?

Example projects, left to right from less to more advanced.