VCA-HW-101 — Electronics and Microcontrollers
The hardware half of the foundation pipeline. Students learn DC circuits, Ohm’s law, breadboarding, Arduino microcontroller programming, sensors and actuators, and soldering. The course bridges the software skills from FND-102 into the physical-layer work that RE-101 demands — students leave with a tangible “I built this” artifact and the physical intuition to interpret schematics, datasheets, and PCBs.
Course Overview
VCA-HW-101 is the course where abstractions become physical. A student who completes FND-101 and FND-102 can reason about a byte in memory; after HW-101 they can reason about the voltage on a trace, the timing of a clock signal, and the difference between a datasheet pin description and the actual behavior they can measure on the bench. The course assumes no prior electronics experience but does assume FND-102 fluency with Python and the Linux shell, since Arduino sketches and the development environment are worked from the command line alongside graphical tools.
What Students Learn
- DC circuits. Voltage, current, resistance, Ohm’s law. Series and parallel. Power budgets.
- Breadboarding and prototyping. Safe hookup, color-coded conventions, the lab-notebook discipline.
- Measurement. Multimeter, logic probe, introductory oscilloscope.
- Soldering. Through-hole first, optional introduction to surface-mount.
- Arduino microcontroller platform. Sketches, the Arduino IDE workflow, digital and analog I/O.
- Sensors and actuators. Temperature, humidity, accelerometer, light, buttons; LEDs, motors, servos.
- Basic serial communication. UART between Arduino and host, introducing the protocols covered in depth in RE-101.
Capstone (Planned)
A self-contained Arduino data logger in a student-fabricated enclosure. The student selects a physical phenomenon to measure (temperature over time, soil moisture in a planter, room light levels, door open/close events), writes the sketch, calibrates the sensors, soldered the connections, built a usable enclosure, and delivered a working device plus a lab-notebook report.
Certification Alignment
No direct industry certification covers this content at the 10th-grade register. Arduino offers a low-stakes practitioner certification but it is not widely recognized. Virtus’s own VCA-HW-101 Certificate is the credential of record; the student’s capstone data logger is the portfolio piece.
Interested in VCA-HW-101?
Email academy@virtuscybersecurity.com with your register and why. Demand signals drive the priority of charter completion.