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Recently I have been quite interested in physics and how the universe works "mechanically". It's not a passion I had when I was a kid like Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and almost all the world's famous cosmologists might say. Funny story about how I got this passion. 6 months ago, I wanted to learn a new skill to add to the list of things I can do, so my elder brother recommended that I learn how to repair electronics. I thought "hey what a great idea", because growing up I have always loved gadgets, well using them, so I thought if you love them so much why not try to fix them when they get broken.
Without delaying, in about 2 weeks from when he came up with the idea, I became an apprentice at a popular tech hub of my country around mid august 2025, so yeah im like 6 to 7 months in now, although my time as an apprentice was barely 4 months, I caught on quickly. These days you could learn almost any skill with the help of YouTube and "guided" AI. Guided because sometimes AI can be misleading, especially if you don't learn how to prompt the queries well. All I needed was the push, real-life customers bringing in their broken phones, and my boss trusting me enough to get the job done.
I studied the market over that period and realized that the people who repair the logic board, or some might say the motherboard of the phones, earn way more than those who just do what is generally called basic repairs or part swapping repair (screens, batteries, charging sub board, and sometimes flex cables).
I guess you can see where this is going...
Who wouldn't want to earn more, and be on top of the game. Not only income, but I noticed those guys were more respected than the rest of us. Anytime you enter the office of someone who is into the board repair, the equipments alone tells you that these guys are on a whole nother level. Fortunately and unfortunately for me, the shop where I went to learn the skill was just basic repairs, so therefore we would have to outsource in case the problem of the customer had to do with the logic board.
Because I had the passion for it, I told my boss that I would like to take up the responsibility of fixing board issues, meaning I would be the one to take the devices (phones, tablets, watches, laptops....) to the board repairers.
This was a great decision I took since it gave me quick exposure to these guys who have been in the game for years. I took some as my mentor, especially a guy called Christian at one of the malls called Nava Plaza (not so popular). I would sometimes take the devices to him and stand by just watching and taking some pictures with my Android, which has a disastrously funny story to it around November last year, will talk about it soon in my blogs. You can guess that I screwed it up, but the "how and what I learned" from that mistake is worth writing about.
I asked Christian to tell me about how he had become a board level repairer, and to my surprise, he said, "I did it all on my own, without being an apprentice to anyone". I was like "What!". He said "Yes, it took me 2 years of consistent study and investment into donor boards and equipment to get this far". He again told me "You too can, seeing you sound educated enough". I was like "Thanks for the compliment, I'm going to give it my all".
I have to add this to the story, otherwise, you might not get the whole picture
My brain processes things in a first principle way, meaning, if I don't go down to the root of things I would most likely never understand it, and if I don't understand it, I would never feel confident about it. In short, I have a tedious life of trying to pick up every detail before we're good to go on anything. With such a way of thinking, if not guided, it could lead you down a rabbit hole of indefiniteness seeking understanding of everything, which is not so effective if you've got a deadline, but super effective in making you a master of a thing, capable of teaching literally anyone.
To those familiar with electronics, you know the first thing to get a grip on will be Ohms law, basically the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance. I took about a month to get a fair idea of what those 3 were, but they weren't deep enough, untill i started learning about how the components on the board shows these relationships.
Trust me, capacitors, inductors, diodes, and transistors would never make a complete holistic sense to you if you deceived yourself into thinking you understood the mechanics of voltage, current, and resistance (for a beginner). As mechanics inclined as I think, I knew something was off with my understanding of the operations. Yes, I could recite what they did if someone asked me because I had watched soo much videos and read countless of chatgpt responses, but yet, something was off. I told myself, I would proceed with the study and maybe as i go further, what i didn't understand would maybe make sense as I see more operations of it.
General Definitions:
Voltage ofcourse is the potential difference between two points in an electrical circuit.
Current, as the name implies will be the flow of electric charge in an electrical circuit.
Resistance, also as the name implies will be the opposition to the current.
But what the heck is potential difference if you don't have a science background or you just memorized to pass exams back in senior high?
I would fall in the second category of that question above, so it means the work done is zero. Yes, it did occur to me that I wish I had taken my science lessons more seriously, or at least the electrical part of things would have done the job.
Anywho, you can get a fair idea of what ohms law is about if you watch lots of videos enough to think of voltage as the pressure energy source, current as the flow, and resistance as the opposition to the flow. A mental construct of balls of particles moving from one place to another, is enough knowledge to fix some problems. If you take two plates, and reduce the amount of electrons at one side, creating a difference (potential difference between two points), you have instantaneously created a voltage. In some blogs to come i will take time and explain this in detail, for now I believe you got a picture.
Now this mental picture I just described will do you good, until you get to the real operations of capacitors and inductors. And that's where my Dunning-Kruger Effect took place. You know those instances when you think you have a fair idea of something, and it's like I get it now, only to find out later about the complexity of the thing, and it dawn on you that you don't know "sh*t". Yeah, that's what the Dunning-Kruger effect is about, and I had my first share of it.
The General definitions I saw flying around everywhere I searched for what capacitors and inductors, were:
"Capacitors are electronic components that store energy in an electric field, while inductors are also electronic components but they store energy in a magnetic field".
Gee, that was some definition, to the unpreviewed.
Sounds simple, they both store energy, get on with it... Of course, but if you have to repair them, shouldn't you at least know what it is?
That right there was my brain negotiating with me on whether we should go down that rabbit hole or not during the christmas season last year. Yep, I spent my Christmas holidays trying to understand this strange thing called fields.
But I still didn't get it.
As part of my new years study plan for 2026, I told myself, I'm gonna spend the whole of january trying to get what this "field thing" is and how these components store energy inside them. It took me 10 days, to finally get it, and to be precise it happened on the 10th of January 2026 around 10:38 PM (yep I checked the time) because it was a light bulb moment for me.
Eureka!!!
"But wait a minute, what the heck is all this... You're telling me that space itself stores energy, and transfers that energy in a system? So it not really the particle but it's the condition of space because the particles are there that makes it behave that way?"
Now it was no longer about understanding it to fix a device, but understanding it to appreciate how the universe works. The only way we could build a device or any system in existence is for it to operate according to the laws of the universe, which is what physics is all about. You could never have a system operating for a while if the laws of the universe was not consistent but kept changing. This alone tells us that there is consistency in the known universe.
I know some of you may not understand what I just said, but I am going to make a blog to explain fields in details (without the calculations ofcourse, come on man I just started learning).
So much learnt from that moment till today, and I will be sharing them when I get the chance to write a blog on Hive. Have I quite the repairs? Probably not, but my interest in learning about the universe seems to surpass the repair at this point so I will go where the river takes me for now.
