I have lots of spare time after work and little spare money. I wish I make big money. :-(
I plan to get my hands dirty - real circuit buildings. I'm going to get the Nuts & Volts every month.
What are the must-have test equipments in electronics? My focus is on digital but I think I need to understand the basic analog stuff.
Do the oscilloscope or multimeter can be used for troubleshooting digital circuits?
How effective the cirucit design program? Some authors suggest that those are very helpful.
And the last, to understand electronics is like to learn physics? I gotta solved hundreds problems to understand a theory or law then, I could apply on my own.
A multimeter is a must; an oscilloscope is nice, but not a must-have; you can get by without it.
A small-tip soldering iron is a must for printed circuit work. A larger one for large terminals and thick wire connections is also recommended.
Some form of breadboard is useful to build circuits on.
must have: needlenose pliers, wire cutters useful: wire strippers, tabletop vise useful: alligator clip leads, variable power supply
If you know what you're doing, they can help spot and correct mistakes quickly. If you don't know what you're doing, the program can't can't tell you you made a mistake connecting pin 7 to ground instead of pin 8.
Even a simulator program can't work if you can't understand the output it gives you.
You need to be able to read a schematic, and understand what the components in the circuit do. Understanding why those
*particular* values were chosen, and not larger or smaller values, will allow you to modify the circuit to meet your needs.
I'm in the same spot with wanting to get more into the field. And wanted to know if anyone had any links to some good beginner schematics with explainations of how the circuit functions.
I've read three electronics book so far. The Lab manual for the Art of Electronics I'm reading is 4th one.
Well, sometimes I'm getting frustrated too and looking for a good example ciruit that really works all the time.
The funny thing is most electronics books do give detail description about simple circuits for example, emitter follower or op-amp amplifier, etc. After the introduction, the example ciruits become three or 4 times complexed even in the introductory books. I only guess to explain a good ciruit - 30 or 40 IC - takes too many spaces and time for the authors.
I read [TABS] Electricity and Electronics. The author said it's intended for the beginner who doesn't have math or electrical background. So, he put few chapters for explaining how to build a lab, test equipments, grounding rules, etc.
But, he did not mention at all how to read the catalog and find the right component. For example, I spent at least one hour to find the right transformer on Digikey catalog book. There are so many types of transformer with different specs. LOL
I think I would end up having hundreds electronic book on a bookshelf till I get the skills I have in mind. :)
When I stuck, I set back and always looking for resources especially books which explain clearly about the subject than the book or material I've read. It's expensive but I prefer not to copy and paste ciruits or memorize formulas.
ONe thing is that it's accumulated knowledge. The larger circuits are generally made up of smaller circuits, so when you know what an emitter follower is, there's little reason to explain it in a more complicated circuit. On the other hand, the description of the larger circuit should be a more overall explanation, so you can grasp what's going on based on your more basic understanding.
As an aside, the more complicated a circuit, the more the layout becomes significant. There are ways to draw schematics where what is going on is far clearer than if it had been drawn a different way. I've seen schematics that make it easy to follow when wiring it up, but is almost impossible to follow to figure out what the circuit is doing.
I think it is natural or common to look at those larger circuits and be puzzled by them. When I started reading hobby electronic magazines when I was a kid, none of it made sense to me. But I kept buying the magazines because I wanted to learn, and there was often some material in each issue that wasn't really technical, so I could get something out of the magazine. And continuing to read them and try to understand was a needed step, because eventually it did become clearer.
Some people want to start with a book that takes them from the very beginnings and then advances. But sometimes that gets bogged down in details that don't matter so much for a lot of people. I sort of bypassed a lot of that stuff where they give analogs to resistors and such, yet on some other level my understanding was fine. But then I jumped in with the magazines, adding books some months later, and I tended to define things from practical schematics rather than learning the theory as a prelude to understanding those schematics. I can't remember what was going on in my mind all those years ago, but with later things, it would have been like looking at a schematic and then reading up on things to figure out that schematic, rather than reading a book from start to finish and then applying that to the schematics.
This isn't going to be helpful, but one of the problems of conveying material to newcomers is that you forget what it's like. So a book will assume you know something that the author knows because of their long participation in the field. Or the author doesn't put themselves in the mind of the reader, and realize how daunting it can be coming into the field.
Treat the early experience as sort of a throwaway, that if you don't try in the first place you won't get any further. But the trying will soon enough put sense to some of it, and that leads to further learning.
The first time I tried to build something, I picked a store out of the yellow pages (it was a time when there were local stores that sold electronic parts to the hobbyist) and went there with the list of parts copied out of the magazine article. That project never worked. IN retrospect, it might have been something like my awful soldering on the project (again, practice makes that better), but I had so little knowledge that when the store subsituted parts I wouldn't know if they were suitable or not, and just about everything about the assemblying was guesswork on my part. Did I wire that coil write, or did I mix up the connections? ANd the second project, again going to the store to buy the parts, didn't work either.
But oddly, after a few months, I'd picked up enough that I could put a simple audio oscillator together using parts I'd taken off a surplus computer board (back when those boards were full of transistors) and a transformer I took out of a transistor radio. I merely twisted the leads together, but it worked. SOmehow, in some way, I had picked up enough that I was less dependent on following the instructions in the book, so I could decide that that transistor just might work here, and it did.
If I'd stopped after the first failed project, or hadn't bought a second magazine about electronics, I wouldn't have gotten up that curve where it was easier to go further.
It helps if you buy used books. Then you don't have to decide at the time whether or not it's worth the cover price. For a few dollars you can usually learn something from it. ANd reading books about more specific things is always a way of getting new stimulus. When I go to used book sales and find books about electronics, I'll generally buy them, because they are so cheap I might as well have them around.
An analog oscilloscope can, yes. But remember, you cannot view a 20MHz digital signal properly on a 20MHz bandwidth oscilloscope!
- Multimeter
- Function Generator (with a TTL output)
- Dual channel Analog Oscilloscope, 60MHz or better preferred.
- A Logic Probe is handy for digital work
- Power supplies, and lots of them, you can never have too many power supplies. For digital work, one with a fixed 5V and 3.3V supply is handy, or an adjustable high current one (say 3A) with a small adjustable range (say 0-6V). You can make your own power supplies if needed.
- For digital design, you cannot beat having a Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO), they are very handy for capturing waveforms like serial data packets. PC based ones are not as good, but are at least affordable.
- For digital design a Logic Analyser might come in very handy. Once again, PC based one are inexpensive.
That's why I like Forrest Mims' books of small circuits. They're building blocks. Power supplies, flip-flops, oscillators, etc. They're also reliable. They always work, as long as they're assembled correctly. I'd like electronics books by TAB if only they weren't riddled with errors in their schematics.
Amen! Step aside, we're in the same boat. Part of the learning process for me was in studying a great many circuit articles in those magazines. They were usually clear, well-written, and easy to understand. As I gained more experience, I was able to build more of these projects with more confidence because I actually understood what was happening in the circuit, rather than just following the instructions and hoping it would work. I solved a
20-year-old electronics mystery recently this way... there was an article about building an electronic drum set that was published in a magazine in the late 1970s that I really wanted to build, except for one thing: they'd left out the part number for a critical transistor!!!!!! I kept the article, revisiting it every once in a while. Eventually, after having built several other drum circuits that were kind of similar, I made an educated guess as to which transistor would be used in that particular application... Then, one day, after buying a bunch of electronics hobby mags at a library sale, I found that very same article republished in another collection of electronics articles -- and in this reprint, they printed the part number of that particular transistor -- and I discovered that my guess was RIGHT!!!!
And how! Ham fests are good places for these things, as well as buying back issues of ham radio magazines. These are jam-packed with small hobby projects that are perfect for beginners. (The only catch to this is that they sometimes do contain errors, and it's necessary to look at a few subsequent issues to look for corrections.)
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