Newbie: tips on how to start?

I'm looking into picking up electronics as a hobby. What advice can you spare?

Thanks in advance, Rui Maciel

Reply to
Rui Maciel
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spare?

start to tear things apart.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

good one. Also get a book on basic / beginner electronics and maybe check out a magazine like Nuts & Volts.

Reply to
1jam

Could you elaborate on that?

Rui Maciel

Reply to
Rui Maciel

What information should be covered in those basic/beginner electronics books? Regarding Nuts & Volts, I would prefer to keep away from providers of subscription-only content. Are there any sites that are worth following?

Rui Maciel

Reply to
Rui Maciel

You've said nothing of your experience level. If you're very new at this, take a look at this:

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Reply to
ED

An LED flasher!

Reply to
John Doe

take things apart if they're not dangerous and aren't expensive. Look inside, see the parts, touch them, read about them.

cheap junk electronics is a good source of parts too.

you can grab a cheap am radio, remove the cover and even just poke around at the parts while it's on.

somebody mentioned an LED flasher. this is a fairly easy project, and a good start. You can probably find LEDs just looking in the garbage for 3 seconds.

Reading books and stuff in the inernet is great, but cannot ever replace actually using your hands and just playing with parts to see what happens, or even just learning how to take things apart and to put them back together again.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

u spare? =A0

What kinds of stuff are you interested in. Computers and micro's? Audio stuff, hacking existing products, blowing things up and making big sparks, Ham radio, electric power, robots,????

Do yu have any gear or access to it? Gear is the stuff you use to do electronics, oscilloscopes, signal generators, power supplies, voltmeters, and all that.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

Get Win Hill's book, The Art of Electronics. And try to follow the math as much as you can.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

My short term goal is to be able to make terribly simple stuff, such as LED flashlights and solar- powered fans, but it would be great if I could go from there onto building simple peripherals that could interface with personal computers.

No, I'm a bit empty-handed on this one. What gear do you suggest? I guess at least a multimeter is in order.

Rui Maciel

Reply to
Rui Maciel

Oddly enough, building a LED flash light did crossed my mind. It looks simple enough and somewhat problem-free.

What do you recommend I should read/purchase before I start this sort of project?

Rui Maciel

Reply to
Rui Maciel

I've had a electromagnetic field and waves course in college, but it was a long time ago (it's all a blur by now) and it never delved beyond the basics. What topics do you suggest I should wrap my head around?

Rui Maciel

Reply to
Rui Maciel

long time ago (it's all a

suggest I should wrap my

For fun:

All do fun things with electricity(and other stuff).

Reply to
Sjouke Burry

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Reply to
David Eather

As I recall, the first do-it-yourself references I used were called "electronics handbooks" maybe from RadioShack. They were small cheap paper pamphlet style books that diagrammed simple circuits you can make with some basic integrated circuits (ICs). Another source of circuits, again for building stuff, was National Semiconductor's 1988 CMOS Logic Data Book (available on CD about the time I stopped using it). I would bet that nowadays you can find massive amounts of all levels of circuits on CDs. That is what I would look for.

Also not long before I stopped enthusiastic electronics hobbying, I made a Tonal Voltmeter that might be instructive if not useful for electronics. If you can work your way up to that, I would make one as soon as possible. It lets you listen to small voltage output waveforms. It requires little more than a CD4046 IC. You can find it on the Internet doing a search for "Tonal Voltmeter". I sure wish they would include it on a voltmeter/multimeter, it would be a simple addition. Then again, that would make little difference to me now, my current interests are skating and gaming. Electronics is powerful stuff, I still reminisce and get that "force" feeling from time to time.

Whatever you eventually decide to do, good luck and have fun.

Reply to
John Doe

On second thought, I would probably skip CDs and just find the example circuits on the Internet.

Reply to
John Doe

The book should have some projects you can build, theory is important, but it's good to have somthing you can kick too.

content.

Check out a few public libraries you may find one with a collection of electronics hobby magazines.

makezine and instructibles often have good stuff, although the quality at instructibles is sometimes wanting.

There's some free lectures here too.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

Battery powered of course, if poking with your fingers!

Reply to
JW

flashlights and solar-

simple peripherals that

Just so you don't get any false hopes, note that since the demise of DOS it has gotten *much* harder to build simple peripherals. Used to be you could use the parallel printer port for lots of neat interface tricks, from digital I/O to simple A/D and D/A. But printer ports are all replaced by USB these days, so a "simple" peripheral usually requires a not-so-simple USB interface and driver software.

One thing that almost every computer has, however, is a sound card. This is not only something you can use to generate and analyze audio-range signals (see sig), but it can also be a way to interface certain devices to the computer. You have to deal with the fact that sound cards don't respond to DC, nor to really high frequencies, but that still leaves a lot of room for useful projects.

As one simple example, you can use the sound card to measure frequency, so if you have some sensor (temperature, pressure, etc) that only responds to DC, you can build a simple voltage-to-frequency converter and use the sound card to measure the resulting frequency.

least a multimeter is

You absolutely need a DMM, but you can start out with a real cheapie. Harbor Freight has nifty little units that are often on sale for a couple of bucks... including battery! The drawback over a pro-level meter is that they don't have low AC Volts ranges (but they do have low DC Volts). So, use this as an excuse to build a little precision recifier and filter circuit, so you can read AC on the DC range.

You can use the sound card to measure low AC volts, including true RMS (which cheap DMMs don't do), but you'll have to calibrate the inputs if you want absolute results... there is no way to get calibration data from the sound card driver, etc. But you can do a lot of useful things with only relative measurements, which don't require any calibration. (For example, distortion is a relative measurement.)

But back to simple circuits: I always enjoyed sound-generating circuits. They can be as simple or complex as your abilities, and it's great fun to hear the results. The sound card can help you visualize the results, since it was designed for just this audio range.

It wouldn't hurt to have a "real" hardware scope as well, but you can save that expense for later, when you really need high-frequency or DC capabilities.

I use a 100 MHz hardware scope for general-purpose stuff, and the sound card (and software) for audio stuff. The "real" scope is an old analog model, so it doesn't have the fancy spectrum analysis features that you can get on high-end digital scopes. But (for me, anyway) I can do all that with the sound card, plus lots more (like color spectrograms) that the digital scopes don't do.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v5.10 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter Frequency Counter, FREE Signal Generator Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI DaqMusic - FREE MUSIC, Forever! (Some assembly required) Science (and fun!) with your sound card!

Reply to
Bob Masta

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