How to break through the bottleneck of microcontroller learning

This topic is currently mainly discussed for learners of microcontrollers, and may be expanded to more fields in the future.

I often encounter questions like this: "When I am studying, it seems that I have learned everything in the book. I can debug the programs in the book by myself and can even modify them by myself, but I don’t know what to do next. If I am asked to develop a product by myself, I just can’t do it. Is there any way?"

What should I do? I don’t know. It seems that there is really no universal method.

I am self-taught. When I think about how I went from knowing nothing to being able to independently develop products, it seems that there are many non-technical factors involved. I would like to discuss these issues separately. In this chapter, I will only talk about technical issues.

(1) Understanding and grasping the essence of things

Many people (including myself) always equate the success of a product with the technical content when they first start learning, and always look down on some seemingly non-technical work. Even relatively mature technicians will say: "The success of a product depends on customer needs, not the level of technical content." But when they actually do it, they forget this point... I've gone off topic, so let's get back to talking about a technical issue.

One day I was on duty in the classroom and saw a student using a charger to charge his cell phone battery. It had an LED indicator light (what's so strange about this? Who can't install an LED indicator light?), it was flashing (this is ridiculous, isn't a flashing LED the most basic function?), it was gradually brighter (well, that's nothing). Okay, let's analyze it.

First, this mobile phone battery charger is small and cheap (I believe it is not difficult to draw this conclusion after the previous description). Secondly, it can be roughly inferred that an MCU is used in it. If you search for articles about chargers on the Internet or disassemble a few broken chargers, I believe it is not difficult to draw a conclusion. The price of the MCU should be 1 yuan or a little more. So how does this light effect come about?

Some people may be confused, but most people are still sober: "PWM, what's so special about it?" Not bad, let's take this as a topic. If I am organizing the development of this charger, I will take this part out separately and ask you to do it. How about it?

"It's a small matter, how can it be difficult for me?" Well, let's pause this article and see if there are any bloggers willing to discuss it. What do you plan to do? Which part do you think is more troublesome to do this?