Most courses skip the hard parts. Not this one.
28 lectures that change how you see technology forever — not what buttons to press, but why everything works the way it does, from the physics up.
As you build the robot, you discover how your own brain works. Every component has a biological twin. Every circuit has a neural equivalent. By the end, you understand two of the most complex systems ever built — and why they look so much alike.
Physics, electronics, computing, software, networks, and AI are not separate subjects — they are layers of the same thing. This course teaches them as they actually are: connected, dependent on each other, and only fully understood together.
This isn't a course about today's technology. It's a way of thinking about all technology — past, present, and future. Once you have the foundations, every new tool, language, or system you encounter has a place in the framework you built from scratch.
Each lecture. The technology. The neuroscience.
Two lectures, shown in depth. The technology concept, the biological parallel, the hands-on task — and the insight that connects them.
Everything in your phone, your laptop, and every piece of modern electronics is built from one idea: a switch you control with electricity. This lecture explains what a transistor is physically, how it works, and why its invention changed the world more than almost anything else in the last century.
A gate voltage controls current through a channel. Off or on. Zero or one. The physical implementation of binary logic in silicon.
Your neurons are biological switches. On or off, fire or don't fire — the same binary principle as a transistor, just implemented in biology instead of silicon.
Wire the photoresistor from Lecture 05 through a MOSFET to your motor. For the first time, your robot responds to the world. Sense → switch → action. Every computer ever made is a variation on this loop.
"There are more transistors on a modern CPU than there are neurons in a human brain. Both are switches. The difference is 50 years of miniaturisation — and we still don't fully understand either one."
This lecture answers one of the most surprising questions in all of computing: why are two numbers enough? How did we get from voltage — a continuous physical quantity — to AND, OR, NOT, and ultimately to every calculation a computer has ever performed? The answer is both simpler and more profound than most people expect.
AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR — five gates from which every digital circuit can be constructed. The complete vocabulary of computation.
Excitatory and inhibitory neurons implement biological logic. Your brain decides by combining signals through AND/OR/NOT operations — in wetware.
Using physical AND, XOR, and OR chips, construct a circuit that adds two numbers and shows the result as light. No processor, no code — just gates. Arithmetic from first principles.
"Every calculation your phone has ever done — every photo processed, every message encrypted, every game rendered — reduced, at the bottom, to gates switching. This lecture is the moment that becomes real."