Starting a little over two years ago, I wanted to build instrumentation for an inexpensive, open-source, water quality sensor system. As part of that effort, I had to learn many facets of Electrical Engineering; although the breadth of my learning may not qualify me for the title of “Electrical Engineer.” I wanted to record my learning experience and describe in some detail the projects that I have completed. Below you will find Buttons leading to various subjects including the description of the “Universal Sensor Interface” (USI) which is the major goal of the project. The USI is intended to interface with pH, turbidity, temperature, pressure and conductivity sensors that form the core sensors used for field analysis of water quality.
I don’t consider myself a complete Electrical Engineer but I have always wanted to build my own circuits and kept up on the hobbyist perspective of actually designing and building a circuit. Machining or etching your own PCB was possible; but in reality, this was a time-consuming nightmare and I even own a CNC machine and made my living as a chemist. Further the CAD tools for designing PCBs were either expensive or clumsy. Then a few years back KiCad became a full fledge design tool and PCB fabrication houses made making the PCBs too cheap to even worry about.
Still building a modestly complex circuit is not easy, while the tools make it easy to do the fabrication and design, one still has to know what to design and how to efficiently use the available tools. In the rant linked below I review my experience and try to demonstrate that being an amateur Electrical Engineer is a fun and relatively inexpensive hobby.