Frequently Asked
Questions

We strive to keep it simple. Our curriculum starts from the beginning, takes baby steps, reinforces new concepts by challenging you to implement them and uses repetition to develop familiarity with the fundamentals.

Learning technical skills such as programming microcontrollers is no simple task, so it will require some determination on your part.
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If you start the course and feel like it is going to be over your head, we will be happy to provide you a full refund no questions asked.

Many of our customers are experienced at life and enjoy learning new skills, or freshening up on old ones.

Our most senior student is in his eighties. We have found that age has very little to do with how people fare at mastering the material.

Drive, attitude, and discipline are usually better predictors of success than age.

The Programming Electronics Academy videos are only available for viewing on our membership site. If you’re interested in viewing the videos offline, you may want to consider our Offline package.

You are welcome to share your account with your son, daughter, or grandchild.

All the courses are self-serve, so it depends on how quickly you learn the material and how much time you have available.

At a minimum I would recommend spending an hour a week: 30 minutes watching lesson(s) and 30 minutes practicing challenge(s).

Yes. Upon completion certificates are available for each course.

Yes! We have several different upgrade options available. You can upgrade from a Monthly Subscription to an Annual Subscription and from an Annual Subscription to a Lifetime Subscription. The cost to upgrade is generally reduced the amount of your previous payment.

The instructor for this course is Michael Cheich, an electronics and programming hobbyist. Let's be very clear - he is no professional!

His experience in electronics is all from the school of hard knocks, where imprints of his forehead are scattered across the walls.

Fewer things make him happier than being able to rapidly prototype his thoughts into reality.

He has a passion for learning (which is good because he learns very slowly and if he didn’t have a passion he might not know anything).

Michael is a recent 20 year veteran of the US Military, where he served as an enlisted welder, a commissioned CH-47 helicopter pilot-in-command, and a UH-72 MEDEVAC detachment commander.

The Arduino programming language is based on the C++, which is a derivative of C. C++ is one of the most popular programming languages in the world today.

All of the fundamental concepts of programming including for loops, if statements, data structures, and classes are used in C++. Additionally, the final code that ends up inside commercial products using microcontrollers (this code is sometimes referred to as firmware) is often written in C, giving it wings outside of virtual walls.

The short answer is that C++ is here to stay for a long time, it is a great skill to have, and the Arduino (and it’s MANY derivatives) is only growing more popular as the development board of choice.

Yes! If you sign up for a Monthly, Annual, or Lifetime subscription, you’ll have access to all the courses we offer.

There are a couple ways we sell our courses:

1. Subscriptions: You can get online access to all our courses by signing up for a subscription to the Programming Electronics Academy.  This gives you 24/7 access to our training.
2. One-Time Buy: You can buy individual courses, and have online lifetime access to them.

Yes, the Arduino Crash Course is our free course.

We have our main website programmingelectronics.com and we also have a subdomain dedicated to our training portal, which is academy.programmingelectronics.com. All of our paid training is hosted on academy.programmingelectronics.com We believe having this division allows our customer to have a more distraction free learning environment.

They are basically the same course, but the 2nd edition is more thorough, has a higher production quality, and also includes a module on breakdancing. You may ask then, “Why do you still sell the 1st Edition of the course?” The reason we still offer the 1st Edition is because students consistently say they like how the material is presented and they appreciate having a slightly different take on the same subjects. I’m not one to argue with customers, so hey, why not keep it available? One common way of using the 1st Edition, is to go through the material as a review after completing the 2nd Edition course.

They both give access to all our courses, the only difference is whether you pay monthly or annually.

Once you've checked off all the objectives in the course as being complete, your certificate will be available at the certificates icon on the bottom of your student dashboard.

At this time we do not sell a hard copy version of our book.

Yes!  Check out the For Teachers section on your student dashboard.

We are happy to help clarify questions that deal with specific lessons in the course, you can send your questions to contact@programmingelectronics.com to ask about a specific lesson.

However, we do not consult on individual projects at this time, though it may be a service we offer at a later date.