A Summary of Electronics | Hacker News Reader

A Summary of Electronics

electroagenda.com

207 pointssharjeelsayed43 comments

Very, very nice. Right from the beginning:

> At a fundamental level, electronics is the branch of physics in charge of controlling the flow of charged particles, typically electrons. In practice, electronic engineering uses the highest level manifestations of said flow of charge to provide solutions to problems or needs.

I absolutely love reading text that state what we already feel intuitively and present it as an eloquent statement of fact.

"...branch of physics in charge of... charge"?

I'm not sure who or what the site is for. If you need a one-para explanation of what you can do with electronics - it doesn't really provide that, because it doesn't provide product examples.

If you want a usable introduction to circuit theory - it doesn't provide that either. (Explaining what a transistor does is "beyond the scope of this text"? OK.)

If you want to know how a modern phone works (which is literally all of EE except power electronics in a small portable device) - there's nothing about RF, comms theory and encoding, error correction, and so on.

So what exactly is this supposed to teach readers?

It looks suspiciously like what's sometimes called Cargo Cult writing - the reproduction of ideas from other texts without fundamental insight into the topic or reader needs.

The main point seems to be to promote the author(s) as an authority, but unfortunately if you want to be authoritative it takes a bit more insight and effort than this. (See also - Horowitz and Hill, for example.)

As another poster put it: it’s an introductory overview just to give the reader a quick perspective on what I the topic is about, like an encyclopedia description.

I would expect a 12 year old to get something out of it, or an author who knew no physics but wanted to put a bit of electronics into their mystery novel.

There is an important place for overviews such as this.

I too love conciseness in scientific texts.

Were it 90% of tutorials or blog posts nowadays and it would take 5 or 10x as much space to say the same thing, detours and forced jokes and analogies included, in the process making it less understandable.

The Art of Electronics, by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill is the way to go. It’s over 1000 pages and has an additional exercise book, but at the end one has some basic understanding what’s really going on.

AoE is an outstanding text, I learned a lot from it, but it's not for everyone. It's optimal, IMHO, for STEM undergrads coming from outside of EE. For EE's it's too broad and shallow of a survey, for casual hobbyists just starting out it's too technical.

Analog Devices also has a big, free, really high quality electronics course on their wiki.

Which I think starts here, in case anyone was too lazy to search for it :)

https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/...

a long time ago, I considerd that book to be the closest thing to bible I had

I'd also suggest you get the 2nd edition. It had coverage of some circuits (I'm reminded of a particularly clean 2-transistor 'stiff' current source) that are not subsequently covered in the 3rd edition.)

ALSO: if you do buy the 3rd edition, if you are really into this stuff, be SURE to consider buying "AoE - the X Chapters" which is amazing detail on various corners of EE. There is a particularly beautiful explanation of how to control motors with PWM, why variable resistors to control speed works but not well, and some rules-of-thumb learned. And much more.

And finally, if you are Truly Serious (of course you are!) about learning this stuff: Get "Learning AoE" and buy the components they recommend and do the experiments.

No excuses! Do it! ;-)

Is "AoE - the X Chapters" an extra addition to "AoE 3rd Edition" because everything could not be fitted into one book? Or is it something fundamentally different?

That would make it a set of 3 books to have viz. 1) AoE - 3rd edition 2) X-Chapters 3) Learning AoE.

Have i understood correctly?

PS: Does the 3rd edition omit a lot from the 2nd edition? What are the major differences?

Hmm, while the website seems quite beautifully designed, the introduction is quite rudimentary. I don't think you'd be able to figure out how a circuit works just by reading this.

Electronics is a tremendously complex subject, akin to "mathematics". So just replace one with the other and you'd know what to expect: "a summary of mathematics". Ridiculous, to begin with.

It's perfectly fine. People have to start somewhere. That summary could be someone's ticket to getting started.

Electronics is such a huge and overwhelming topic. Where is one supposed start? Maxwell's equations? Energy Band theory? Maybe for some, but differently prepared folks need different approaches for starting to learn something that is new to them.

This is cool, I’ll use this when I get back to studying electronics.

the next and previous page shouldn’t open in new tabs though :)

To add to this, on iOS I couldn’t get the cookie pop up to clear so after the first 3 sections I had to move on. The writing was indeed great but navigation and screen real estate for mobile made this a bit tough.

Yes, there are small usability quibbles. The fully-justified text on narrow phone screens often produces ridiculously spaced-out words.

If the author is lurking, § 3.2.2.1 Passive Components[1] table headers are listed in English; § 3.2.2.2 Active Components[2] are listed in Spanish.

I'm clearly not the target audience here, but I'd be lying if there wasn't a sense of conceit in its objectivity...kind of like those World Book encyclopedia entries I'd read for hours at a time as a kid, becoming aware of the existence of something, but only enough to sow more questions than answers.

[1] https://electroagenda.com/en/a-summary-of-electronics/analog...

[2] https://electroagenda.com/en/a-summary-of-electronics/analog...

Thank you for pointing out the mistake with the languages. I will solve it when I get some time.

For beginner I'd highly recommend this new book by Jonathan Bartlett, Electronics for Beginners: A Practical Introduction to Schematics, Circuits, and Microcontrollers:

https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484259788

The book comprehensively covers the fundamentals of analog and digital electronics including the basic of amplifier topic that most of the electronics for beginners books ignored.

For electronics workbench typically you would have signal generator, oscilloscope, multimeter and power supply that can cost you some good money and they're not that integrated and programmable. For that I'd recommend this new many-in-one tool from Digilent namely Analog Discovery Pro that is better integrated and can be easily programmable:

https://digilent.com/blog/the-creation-of-the-analog-discove...

This new tool can perform many functionalities for testing and measurement purposes that are crucial for successful circuit design, analog or digital.

Together with the book and Analog Discovery Pro tool, you'll be loaded for the bear in your electronics adventure.

Thank's for making this. How can I export it as a single .pdf to read on my e-reader?

Links in MSWord, expanded on pages, then print to pdf. In 5 minutes you'll have a pdf, even with included links if you want.

I will appreciate if you just redistribute the link instead. As you can see there is no ads in the webpage. But I intend to add them in the future. I won´t get rich but at least I will pay the server!

I have a CS background and are interested in learning more about electronics. Is there a good beginners tool I can use to accurately simulate electronic diagrams and learn from?

Digilent (now part of National Instruments) has some good HW and SW (with accompanying tutorials) for students.

* HW - Analog Discovery 2 or Analog Discovery Studio - https://digilent.com/shop/test-and-measurement-equipment/usb...

* SW - Multisim - https://digilent.com/shop/ni-multisim-student-edition-circui...

* Tutorials - https://learn.digilentinc.com/

Thanks. Much appreciated.

The Analog Discovery 2 + Digital Discovery from Digilent will give you everything. They are small, easy to carry and the Waveforms software interface is pretty good.

You might also want to take a look at;

* RedPitaya STEMLab - https://redpitaya.com/

* Saleae - https://www.saleae.com/

This tool helped me a lot over the past decade, and I still jump to it for simple circuit simulation at work (I do embedded firmware development, but lots and lots of oscilloscope/multimeter/logic analyzer use to troubleshoot and validate)

https://www.falstad.com/circuit/

This tool is fast enough to whip things up during a troubleshooting session alongside Electrical Engineers, and thorough "enough" to be used as a reasonable reference by the Electrical Engineers.

Thanks! I will check it out.

It seems like these guides never include the most useful info: safety. Does anyone know guides that talk about electronics safety?

User or component safety? I think in general electronics do not require much in the way of user safety (Ofcourse I exclude power electronics and other high-energy systems) beyond how to properly use measurement devices. Component safety, eg: the art of not killing your semiconductors is another beast entirely

From Wikipedia's "Electrolytic capacitor" article:

"Applying a reverse polarity voltage, or a voltage exceeding the maximum rated working voltage of as little as 1 or 1.5 volts, can destroy the dielectric and thus the capacitor. The failure of electrolytic capacitors can be hazardous, resulting in an explosion or fire."

Even a small one could take somebody's eye out if they happened to be close to it when it failed and not wearing eye protection.

Even low power components can do things that could hurt you if you do something wrong with them.

When I was first playing around with electronics as a kid using kits and individual components purchased from Radio Shack I once put an LED directly across the terminals of a lantern battery.

The LED exploded sending little bits of plastic flying off at high speed. They all missed me, but if I had been in a little different position when hooking up that LED my lesson in the importance of using current limiting resistors with LEDs could have been punctuated by a serious eye injury.

I'd say that a paragraph when each component is introduced covering what bad things that component can do if you exceed its voltage, current, or power limits would be a good idea even if the course is only dealing with low power systems.

The YouTube channel ElectroBOOM comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ0-OtVpF0wOKEqT2Z1HEtA

He always does the exact thing you're not supposed to do.

Nice work. Need a a little more work on the website.

The website is fine, it's simple, legible, responsive, lightweight and does not distract from the content...

Terrible website structure, forces you to click and load new pages for every concept, no download option, no see "all in one page" option. Lots of screen area waste.

Have you made any public contributions we can critique?

Entirely irrelevant, empty deflection, to the points I made.

I think your criticism would have been better received if you hadn't phrased it so harshly (e.g. "terrible website structure").

Ok I’ll be more direct: your response makes you sound like an asshole.

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