Find a project and make it. Maybe something off adafruit? https://learn.adafruit.com/

Pick up a pinecil for your first soldering iron.

May I suggest the Pinecil, if you're seeking a soldering iron?

https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-soldering-iron/

The Pinecil is a smart mini portable soldering iron with a 32-bit RISC-V SoC featuring a sleek design, auto standby and it heats up to an operating temperature in just 6 seconds!

• Dual power input design: 1) USB-C supports both PD and QC 3.0 and; 2) DC5525 barrel DC jack.

• Speedy Rapid Warmup: Reaches operating temperature in 6 seconds. Support for on-demand rapid boost feature.

• Adjustable soldering tip temperature which can be set between 100° C and 400° C using the adjustment buttons and an easy-to-read OLED display.

• Portable: it features a sleek and slim design, comprised of an SAE 304 stainless steel core housed inside a polycarbonate shell.

• Auto standby mode engages when it is not in use ensuring the user safety.

• OS: Ralim’s IronOS build

• Chipset: Bouffalo BL-706

• CPU: 32-bit RV32IMAFC RISC-V “SiFive E24 Core” @ 144 MHz

It's got good support from the manufacturers and is a very versatile little starter gun if you don't already have one. Also very affordable.

https://learntosolderkits.com/collections/all

Some cheap little fun project kits. I started with the jitterbug.

For deeper info, you might try these Lemmy communities:

!askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de

!electronics@discuss.tchncs.de

If you're wanting to practice soldering, and build a small, cheap project at the same time, I'd recommend cheap project kits from Aliexpress (there are probably equivalents on Amazon). Do projects that are through hole soldering first, before attempting SMD components.

There are plenty to choose from and they're cheap, so if it doesn't work then it doesn't matter much.

• LED Christmas Trees
• Digital Clocks
• Bluetooth speaker - the SMD components are done for you.
• FM Radio Kits
• LED Sound Spectrum Display - Lots of practice with this one

There will be plenty of Youtube videos of people putting these things together if you want to know more.

Have fun!

Wow, you couldn't be more different than I am. Over the years, I've bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there's better tutorials for things now than "make a bunch of LEDs blink in order", so maybe the terrain is different.

There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.

It seems like kits are divided into "contains every part of a specific project" or "contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here's a booklet of tutorials for some". I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.

Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just "necropsies" on broken things to understand how they work.

Something that you'll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the "premium" widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.

Robotics can be dangerous, don't jump into the deep end of robotics without learning how to use electronics first. Definitely start with electronics and move up to robotics once you have a lot of electronic failures under your belt. I would suggest that you keep robotics in mind as you learn.

Many people provided you with great places to start with electronics. Start there, because robotics are electronics with motion and that's more dangerous. Motion can hurt someone or start a fire. Especially for as a hobby I'd be most concerned about accidentally starting a fire because of bad code and poor failure planning.

If you pick this up and get some experience with electronics, you'll begin to understand a lot of the things that can go wrong with robotics before they start a fire. Also this can get very expensive, you will destroy components. It's inevitable. I may be speaking from experience.