Temperature sensors, PIR motion detection, light and distance sensors, servo and DC motors, ADC/DAC conversion, and communication protocols (I2C, SPI). The hands-on embedded course for connecting software to the physical world.
This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on sensors you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.
This course is built by engineers who ship sensors systems in production. It reflects how these tools actually behave at scale — not how the documentation describes them.
Every day includes working code examples you can copy, run, and modify right now. The goal is understanding through doing.
Instead of re-explaining existing documentation, this course links to the definitive open-source implementations and the best reference material on sensors available on the internet.
Each day is designed for about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. Do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No calendar commitment, no live classes, no quizzes.
Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.
Analog vs digital sensors, voltage dividers, pull-up/pull-down resistors, signal conditioning with op-amps, ADC resolution and sample rate, and how to read a sensor datasheet to understand accuracy, range, and interface.
DHT22 one-wire protocol, DS18B20 parasite power, BME280 over I2C for temperature/humidity/pressure, calibration offsets, and building a Python pipeline that logs sensor data to CSV or InfluxDB.
PIR motion detection and debounce, RCWL-0516 microwave radar, TSL2591 light sensor over I2C, HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance, VL53L0X laser ToF, and selecting the right sensor for range vs accuracy trade-offs.
PWM control for servo position, servo libraries and angular calibration, DC motor H-bridge drivers (L298N, DRV8833), motor speed with PWM, encoder feedback for position control, and stepper motor basics.
I2C multi-device bus with address conflicts, SPI clock modes and chip select, UART for serial communication, logic level shifting for 3.3V/5V compatibility, and debugging with a logic analyzer.
Instead of shooting our own videos, we link to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.
Hands-on tutorials for connecting and reading data from common sensors — temperature, motion, light, and distance — with Arduino.
How I2C and SPI work electrically and in code — clock, data lines, addressing, and common debugging issues.
PWM control for servo position, servo library usage, and how to calibrate servo range for your application.
Driving DC motors with H-bridge ICs, PWM speed control, and bidirectional motor control in embedded C and Python.
Combining multiple sensors (accelerometer + gyroscope, for example) to produce more reliable measurements than any single sensor provides.
The best way to deepen understanding is to read the canonical open-source implementations. Clone them, trace the code, understand how the concepts in this course get applied in production.
CircuitPython and Arduino library for the BME280 environmental sensor. Read the source to understand the I2C register protocol for temperature/humidity/pressure.
Python library for DHT11 and DHT22 temperature/humidity sensors. The timing-critical one-wire protocol implementation is educational reading.
Raspberry Pi GPIO library with hardware PWM, GPIO DMA, and waveform generation. The most powerful GPIO library for the Pi.
The Arduino AVR core. Understanding the wiring.c implementation reveals what happens when you call analogRead() and digitalWrite() at the hardware level.
You can write the cloud side. This course covers the physical side — the sensors, actuators, and protocols that connect your software to real-world data.
Sensors and actuators are the vocabulary of hardware projects. This course covers the most useful ones and the communication protocols that connect them.
Robots are sensors + actuators + control logic. This course covers the hardware fundamentals that every robotics engineer needs to understand.
The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers embedded systems and hardware engineering in depth — hands-on, with practitioners who build AI systems for a living. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
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