Does anyone have recommendation on a simple self contained primer to understand electronic circuits as shown in this article. Article is very interesting but am hampered by lack on ability to understand the circuit diagram.
An alternative is, read about the following:
1. Ohm's law -- the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance. And power.
2. Learn how to sum resistors in parallel vs resistors in series.
3. Learn about capacitors, how do they charge? (the RC constant). What happens afterwards?
4. Now learn about RC circuits (resistor+capacitor), which means you will learn about filters: low pass, high pass, at the very least. Know how to calculate the 'cutoff' frequency.
5. Learn about how a transistor works. First, how it can be made to work as a switch. Then, how it can be made to work as an amplifier.
6. Learn about the inductor (the "L" in L,R,C). Learn the relationship between inductors, capacitors and resistors.
7. Since now you know about inductors, you can also see Oscillator circuits using transistors.
ALTERNATIVELY
on step 5, instead of learning about transistors, learn about opamps. It is easier to understand than transistors!
Then learn about how to implement oscillators with opamps, filters with opamps.
Afterwards you may perhaps want to learn about digital circuits. If you understand boolean algebra or bit logic functions (and, or, xor, not), then this will be a piece of cake.
And I also recommend learning about opamps instead of transistor amplifiers, easier and more practical. However the transistor as switch is still very useful to understand.
Could you take a quick look at the simulation I attached elsewhere in this discussion? Let me know if that simulation and the notes around it are helpful for your understanding.
When you have any solid object, it's got a crystalline latice structure at the molecular level. Do you remember valence shell electrons from chemistry? They're the outermost shell. They are only tenuously connected to their atom and so it's easy to push them around, but the atom wants to be electrically neutral (#electrons = #protons)
In a conductor, let's say copper, you can shove on one end of the crystal with an electric field and induce a movement on those valence shell electrons that propagates your shove across the lattice. You could measure how much energy each electron gets from its shove, we'll call this Voltage. The rate of electric field moving through a particular surface area is called Current. In a perfect conductor, the voltage of the wave moving across the surface doesn't drop off. We can think of wires as being pretty good conductors, and in diagrams they exist as platonic perfect conductors. Also note that the amount of current in one end of the wire has to equal the current out or you would be losing or gaining a net electric charge.
So now you know the rules for a straight line in a diagram. The rest is learning how electric fields behave in other kinda of bulk materials. In the resistor, the voltage change across the entire resistor is proportional (linearly) to the flow of current through the resistor.
In a capacitor, we place two wide metal plates across from each other by a small distance. This doesn't form a complete connector - charges can't cross - but initially current flows in to charge the plates, then dies off as the voltage difference between the two opposing plates equalizes with the voltage applied to the capacitor. So these devices hold a charged electric field, and they allow high frequency changes in voltage to pass through, but low frequency is blocked by the charge saturation.
Inductors are similar to capacitors, but the energy is stored in a magnetic field. If you wind some wire into a coil, the magetic field from the wire acts as a sort of flywheel. These devices allow low frequencies to pass through.
Diodes are made out of crystalline solids called semiconductors, where a pure ingot of silicon (an insulator) is doped with a donor like Boron or Arsenic. Depending on whether the donor has fewer or more valence electrons than silicon, we get either a p type or an n type material. If we put a p type next to an n type, there's a thin band near the junction where the opposite types "cancel out" and no charge can pass. But if we apply a small voltage across the ends of the diode, the cancel out region shrinks thinner and thinner until eventually charge does pass through. So these are sort of like a one-way valve for circuits, and you need about 0.7V in the forward direction to get them going.