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thinking of exploring digital electronics

hi all

i recently had the chance to program a microcontroller, and i was really fascinated by the idea that there's a whole computer inside that tiny chip. now i'm thinking i might start fiddling with digital electronics and see if i want to take that up as a hobby. for the moment i have a couple of questions about it:

1) is one kind of current (ac or dc) more prevalent in digital electronics? and more importantly 2) what's the best way to get started? which books should i read? should i get one of those kits where the component pins are attached to clamps and you make temporary circuits by attaching wires to the clamps? are instructional breadboarding kits available? what about those build-your-own-whatever kits - are they useful?

any help will be much appreciated

peace, stm

Reply to
sean_mcilroy
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Reply to
John Fields

A more complex question than it appears! An easy explaination is to think of digital as "switched DC", i.e. it switches between say 5VDC and 0VDC.

Yes, those Tandy/RadioShack 300-in-1 kits are an excellent introduction. Many top electronics designers started on those kits. The best way to learn electronics is to build stuff and experiment, learn the simple building block circuits first. *Don't* start with transistor or semiconductor theory, it will just confuse things and you'll think it's all too hard. Even if you don't quite understand how the basic building blocks work, that's ok for now. Learn all about ohms law, basic AC and DC theory, and then all the digital gates (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR) and digital building blocks like Flip-Flops, counters, decoders etc.

Books are great, but can get too too technical (and boring), be careful.

For starters you could do a lot worse than Colin Mitchell's Digital Electronics book:

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I'm sure there are plenty of online digital courses too.

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

Here are some sample pages from the book:

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If you like it you can order the book here:

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Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

i couldn't google up any "att handbook" but i put a hold on the public library's copy of "art of electronics". thanks all around for the input.

peace

Reply to
sean_mcilroy

If you're mainly interested in microcontrollers, pick a development board (off the top of my head one with great bang for the buck is the Atmel AVR Butterfly -- only $20). Get something with integrated buttons and LEDs so you can stick to the programming part you're comfortable with. When you want to branch out, most of those boards have spare IOs you can hook to your own creations. Check out piclist.com (though I would have to recommend newcomers strongly consider AVR instead, since it's easier to get a free C development environment going for AVR).

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Ben Jackson

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Reply to
Ben Jackson

DC. Was 5 VDC, moved to 3.3, now going below that.

You can still get "grab bags" of assorted TTL chips from places like Jameco (watch for line wrap)

Might be worthwhile getting one, a breadboard, and a small bench power supply to fiddle with.

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is a possible power supply. It's handy to have one with user-settable current limiting to avoid letting the magic smoke out of too many chips. You could certainly do a "roll your own" supply with a 9 volt battery, a 7805 regulator, and a few caps, though.

A breadboard like one of these

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will let you experiment with various hookups.

If you don't have ready access to an o'scope and/or a logic analyzer you can do a lot with an inexpensive logic probe:

The "TTL Cookbook" mentioned at

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is still a classic in the field.

Eventually you'll probably want to move to hardware description languages like VHDL, Verilog, others, instead of relying on discrete gates. You might consider downloading the free HDL tools from Xilinx or Altera that let you "hook up" virtual circuits and trace the results in their simulator. Nothing like starting out learning to straighten pins, though ...

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Rich Webb   Norfolk, VA
Reply to
Rich Webb

Learn analog first. Digital will come in time. If you don't follow the logical path, things will get very confusing and you will have huge, gaping holes in your knowledge.

Reply to
Vey

Not necessarily dived into digital electronics, but I can highly recommend this URL:

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Sincerely,                      |                http://bos.hack.org/cv/
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Rikard Bosnjakovic

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Reply to
Charles Schuler

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