About a year ago, I found a YouTube channel[0] which consists mostly of a really smart guy (with a proper background in electrical engineering) buying cheap electronics from eBay/Temu/AliExpress/etc, taking them apart and identifying the components, then reverse-engineering them. (Often followed by a discussion of how much better of a product it could be if the manufacturer hadn't cheaped out on a two-cent component.)

I'd previously had a barebones interest in electronics (think: kits with LEDs and buzzers in like 3rd grade), but listening to his discussions and explanations of how these things worked gave me a fairly decent understanding of how some basic electrical principles work.

I also recently watched a video series[1] that explained how microcontrollers (specifically the ATMega328, the one powering the Arduino) work, from a very low level that I've always wondered about. The key part of that series, for me anyway, was getting the chip off of the Arduino PCB and onto a bare breadboard. From there I went and read/skimmed the ATTiny85 datasheet[2] (a very popular "baby brother" chip to the ATMega328) which also helped me understand how these chips do things like PWM on a low level.

I've built one project (a simple PWM dimmer based on a potentiometer) and am working on another (designing a PCB with KiCAD[3] to replace the circuit board for a battery-powered LED lantern, so I can design my own sequencing interface for what happens when you press the singular button), and it has been quite the learning experience, but one I've greatly enjoyed!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom, also at https://odysee.com/@bigclivedotcom:0d

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBq3sO1Z-7o&list=PLNyfXcjhOA...

[2] https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/atmel-2586-...

[3] This comment is long enough already, but KiCAD is a fantastic piece of FOSS software. It's a full schematic/PCB design suite, and there are plenty of tutorials all across the Internet for it.

I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music