Beginners Tools and Rescources

Online Tools (Software & Websites)

When working in the field of , often the answers to a lot of your burning questions can be found online (like with this guide!). As such, there’s many helpfull forums that has the answers you need, as well as creative online tools that will enable you to do simple mechatronical prototypes, without even spending a dime!

TinkerCAD is a free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding. It's used by teachers, kids, hobbyists, and designers to imagine, design, and make anything!

TinkerCAD can be used to create simple circuits with simple functions to test out any circuit ideas you might have, before building it in real life. Their online service is free, but it does require you to register yourself as a user. There’s similar software such as Virtual Breadboard and SimulIDE, which enables similiar prototyping, but in our eyes, TinkerCAD does it best.

A circuit example created in TinkerCAD

GitHub

GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere.

Creating an GitHub account and understanding how to use it might not be that prioritised for new programmers and mechatronic fans, but the strength of GitHub comes in the way it keeps track of the code you’ve been writing for your prototypes. Did you create an amazing code that worked perfectly? Great! GitHub has that version saved for you. You change the code, and suddenly it doesn’t work anymore, and you can’t figure out what caused it? Don’t worry, just go back to the last working version that GitHub saved for you!

Stack Overflow

Doing your travels programming mechatronical prototypes, you’ll likely get an error, need a special piece of code, or just need inspiration to a project you’re working on. As a result, you go to your favorite search engine, type in your question, and most likely, a person on Stack Overflow has been having the same thought as you. Through the Stack Overflow community, you’ll be able to find many answers to programming questions, but be warned, sometimes the answers you find are not what you were asking for...

Instructables

As hobbyist, one of our favorite websites and communities got to be instructables. Through this site, you’ll find an awesome collection of projects created by amateurs and experts alike. If you’re looking for a cool project to work on, then you’ll be sure to find something interessting on instructables!

The page you will see when visiting Instructables/circuits

Use the internet and it's search engines!

Finally, we want to emphasize how usefull the internet is to give you the answers you need. This is of course no surprise that the internet holds tremendous amount of information, but specifically when it comes to programming and mechatronics, we would always recommend trying your worth on the internet rather than in a textbook. Without going into the pros and cons of different search engines and searching techniques, we will give this advice:

  • Use Google when you want what Google THINKS you want
  • Use DuckDuckGo when you want specifically what you search for (which might NOT be what you thought you wanted)

Kits, components and stores

Starter kits and components

If you’re looking to buy e.g an Arduino starterkit, there’s going to be a large selection of options to choose from online. The different kits differ both in price, size, quality and delivery time, which is why we want to give the following few tips when choosing a kit.

  • Off brands can be good enough
  • Don’t buy too much, but also give yourself some options to play around with
  • If you’re not in a hurry, order your kits and components from overseas

Off brands can be good enough

Yes yes, we know it might not say ‘Arduino’ on it, but it works just the same! When starting working with mechatronics, it might not be worth investing in an official, limited edition, diamond engraved Arduino UNO 3, that could potentially be fried when tinkering around with it. Then rather buy three off brands kits for the same price as one official kit, which you then can go crazy with play around with!

Don’t buy too much, but also give yourself some options to play around with

Normally, starter kits will have the basic stuff covered which enables many fun and simple prototypes to be created. That being said, nothing sucks more than wanting to build a LED disco floor consisting off 150 LEDs, only to realise that you only had 145 LEDs in your kit. On the other hand, buying 10.000 LEDs might cause you to throw out your socks and underwear, just to make room for them. So make sure you’re buying a kit that includes enough components for what you think you would want to build, without overdoing it.

If you’re not in a hurry, order your kits and components from overseas

If you want something delivered quick, it might not be cheap, and when it comes to electronical components, no one does it cheaper than Asia. For just a couple of dollars, you’ll be able to buy enough LEDs to build an awesome disco floor, if thats your cup of tea, but with great prices comes great delivery times, which can range from a couple of weeks, to a couple of months! Therefore, only order stuff overseas if you can survive the shipping time, or if the things you order aren’t crucial to a project you want to work on.

Stores

The following sites are what we would recommend when it comes to stores within and outside of the EU:

Stores in the EU:

Stores outside the EU*

* some of these stores also have suppliers inside the EU, but a large amount of the sellers are located in Asia

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