I am an electronics hobbyist and a software engineer. I have an experience of 3.5+ yrs of working on 8051 assembly language,C. I know very well interfacing microcontroller to real world, using sensors,ADC,DAC,motors etc.
But my problem is that I can do programming but for circuit design I have to look for somebody else. I want to learn this last area to give me satisfaction of building something from scratch.
Could anybody suggest me some real good book on practical circuit design. I do not want too much of theory , for that I can go back to my college textbooks.
Win's book, The Art of Electronics, is very good. It would be even better if he finished the Third Edition before quantum nanotubes make electronics obsolete.
Good for you. Get in there and destroy a few op amps, then figure out why they died...good education and great fun.
BTW: About half the circuit problems that new hobbyists face are caused by poor soldering technique. Get a decent soldering iron with automatic temperature control and a few medium-sized conical tips (~1 mm radius), not the long skinny ones. Use 63:37 or 60:40 _lead-tin_, rosin core solder in a fine gauge--0.032 inches preferably. Set the iron at 750 F (400 C) and leave it there. Keep the tip nice and clean by rubbing it on a moist sponge every 2 minutes or so, and make sure that the tip stays tinned. Good tips have iron-plated points that make this easier.
Your solder joints should be shiny and uniform-looking. Dull spots are caused by oxide or too low a temperature. Either one will cause open circuits or intermittent connections.
Lead-free solder is okay for some purposes, but for hand work it's much harder to use. Also, even good lead-free joints aren't as shiny as lead-tin ones, so it's harder to recognize the bad ones. Lead-free parts work fine with lead-tin solder, so you don't have to worry about that.
If you're serious about learning electronic design, get a copy of "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill. (Win is a frequent contributor here, and is very much worth listening too if you can ignore his Massachusetts prejudices. Don't take his horse racing advice either. ;)
Of course, you could follow the path that the college folks use and skip the soldering. Most new engineers never see a soldering iron. They use circuit simulations.
I, too, am from the old school and have the pants with solder dripped holes in them to prove it.
But, a programmer should be quite comfortable with simulations and it does speed up the process.
Then you discover the difference between real world components and simulated ones.
So, make your choice: get frustrated by poor soldering techniques or by simulation limitations.
I think you clearly have enough experience that you could add some interesting additional sections to the book... say, a chapter on high-speed time-domain design, perhaps...
I got my name in a SOI text book ("SOI Circuit Design Concepts") a dozen or so years ago because I let the authors (cow-orkers) use my CD burner so they could ship the manuscript to the publisher on time. ;-) Didn't get a book though.
I walked through the Cornell EE department and estimated the ratio of computer screens to oscilloscope screens. Must be 40:1 or something. I didn't see any soldering irons.
Do simulated products get paid for in simulated dollars?
The place to learn anything worthwhile about practical electronics at Cornell is or was in A&EP, not EE - At least between two decades and a bit ago and a decade and a bit ago. And don't miss the welding classes up in Ag/Bio Eng. The EE electronics courses were being taught with home-made books based entirely on barfback memorization (I took a couple, learned almost nothing). A&EP and Physics had a joint course aimed at getting students to be able to actually build their own stuff for independent experiments, using the AofE. The difference was night and day.
Soldering irons are a rarity in teaching labs. I can think of exactly one (an A&EP course, where a nitrogen laser was constructed - I personally made the attempt to get about 600 students competent to solder during my time as the lab tech there, but I doubt if more than
100 of them were all that good at it coming out the far side). Most teaching labs used the irritating and flaw-prone solderless breadboards, since they were easy to tear down daily for the next lab. The 4x per year teardown of the soldered laser kits was a definite pain in the butt, especially the mid-semester ones, but did mean that those students got real circuit construction experience. Another A&EP course, with a nice 1:1 ratio of scopes to computer screens, caused me to decide that there ought to be a grade of component beyond standard, industrial, and mil-spec - student-spec. Take something that's supposed to be bomb-proof (say, a foldback current limited power supply) and put it out there - only to have it come back in utterly fried. I could not figure out how some of the things that happened, happened. But it kept me busy.
Move out into the graduate labs, where undergrads could get student tech jobs, and more soldering irons would come to light, not to mention the occasional oxy-acetylene torch. Running 4 inch copper pipe from a screen room to a plasma experiment calls for large scale soldering skills.
Thanks to all of you for your time and suggestion. So I see that "Art of electronics" is the authority on the subject, being recommended by so many of you. I am going to get my copy soon. If somebody has any more suggestions please convey them, before I buy a new book. :-)
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