Learn electronics by practice
beletronics.wordpress.com
beletronics.wordpress.com
I never really imagined I would be interested in this stuff, much less find it kind of beautiful. Pure math brain, if you aren't careful, can train you to view anything applied with disdain, and something as earthy as hardware even moreso. But it's kind of beautiful how there are deep and inevitable connections between some of the most abstract theory computer science has to offer (plt, pl design and implementation) and the way physical objects are harnessed for computation. I guess if you consider that von Neumann was a mathematician first and foremost then it starts to make more sense
Either way, I'm having a great time -- definitely recommend anyone in a similar position learn this stuff whenever you're ready for it
I've gone through both and they're both excellent. Nand2tetris requires a bit more set up, but goes deeper into things like language development.
For people who have previously looked at NandGame, there has been quite a bit of extra content added over the last year, well worth taking another look.
You are now a hacker:-)
Just in case you never heard about the CCC and hacker festival s: https://media.ccc.de/
A ton of great video recordings from tons of super cool hacker events are stored and there are also plugins to watch it on a smarttv
> In order to present our paradigm in learning electronics, we can take an example of a full adder chip that enables binary addition. Let us use a top-down approach, and look at the datasheet of the TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) chip 7483. We will immediately notice that the chip performs the addition of two 4-bit binary words, A and B.
...and the associated diagram, just immediately left me feeling like I was standing in a room full of people who were smarter than me. Is this really where one starts while learning basic electronics?
The lab component of such coursework did start with TTL chips but the timing of the coursework was such that you'd have most of the asynchronous logic theory taught by the time the chips came out.
Indeed. The correct way is:
"It is trivially obvious to the most casual observer that the chip performs the addition of two 4-bit binary words"
I had to do a lot of navigation to get to the first page of content; which dropped me straight into a 4-bit full adder. To my mind, that's logic circuits, not electronics.
To be fair, most intro-to-electronics pages start with Ohms Law and so on, which to my mind isn't electronics at all - it's basic electricity. This site starts with diodes, which is indeed the entry-point to electronics proper. But jumping in with gates is arse-over-tit; gates are a special case of amplifiers, and I think explaining transistors as amplifiers should precede explaning them as switches.
Regarding navigation: The whole thing is set in something like Courier, and links don't look any different from body text, even when you hover. And I generally expect no more than one click from the homepage to get me to page 1 of the content. A contents page that links to contents-of-the-contents pages seems like a rabbit-warren.
I took a look at TFA because of this. My experience caps out at doing a few heathkits in the early 80s and one single soldering of a resistor on my Synology to repair an issue a few years ago. I *mostly* understood the diagram, most of which was due to seeing it during CS adjacent classes in the early 90s.
Unfortunately it's often the case that these ELI5 type articles assume baseline knowledge that's less than baseline.
This is the equivalent of introducing programming by giving a piece of ARM assembly and stating that it is immediately obvious that we are dealing with a merge sort implementation.
I’m not sure why, but I see this often in other domains as well. Math in particular. I guess it’s the curse of knowledge.
The bad part of the writing is the assumption that all that technical language and knowledge is stil at the top of your memory when you just picked up this book.
We had those electronics circuit practice boards and you could hook multiple up together to make a half adder.
A group of students that were acing the tests and finishing their homework were spending a couple weeks of time in the back of the class assembling a full adder out of literally all of the practice boards the school owned. I wasn't acing any tests and wasn't finishing my homework on time but I joined them anyway because it was more fun. My contribution was realizing that we could use the relais as and and gates, doubling our resources enabling the completion of the full adder.
> A group of students that were acing the tests and finishing their homework were spending a couple weeks of time [..] assembling a full ladder
Let’s just say I was submerged in a … different socio-economic class.
Here's a real beginner level presentation, from Adafruit.[1] This may be too simplified for some.
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill is highly recommended, but the original audience was physics grad students who needed to build instrumentation for physics experiments. The order of presentation is good, but it's a big book. Because it mentions current components by part number, the book ages rapidly.
I found the material that followed to be a clear exposition of the fundamentals – this is as somebody who has tried to learn electronics over the years but nothing ever stuck. This did a better job than anything else at a pace that is about right for me.
But YMMV and I personally relish being in a room full of people who are smarter than me.
Hmm did you miss the introductory chapter that starts with diodes, transistors and basic logic gates that they told you vaguely about in high school physics?
There's quite a bit of info before getting to using the TTL chips.
Having played a bit with redstone circuits in Minecraft helps too - or knowing about diodes and transistors when doing redstone in Minecraft helps :)
For me, an electronics engineer by degree (not by trade), it was so basic I could see the author forgetting this.
You will probably never see a full adder chip outside of retro and tinkerer stuff. If there are commercial uses left, they might be gone and replaced by FPGAs soon.
If someone asked me to teach them the more modern way, more appropriate for someone who wants to make props or puzzles and stuff as opposed the more retro experimental stuff, I'd advise a bit differently.
I would probably tell them to start with an ESP32 powered Arduino module, and some op amps, because op amps are both easy to understand and practical.
And at the same time, brush up on your pure mathematics side stuff, if you don't want to be like me, not really able to do any of the super high end stuff.
At the basic level you won't even need algebra, as you do more advanced work the math gets heavier.
Before even touching a real circuit, go immediately to the Falstad Simulator, and check out their example circuits. No, it's not perfectly accurate, but it is an amazing tool and runs right in a browser.
I think there's a lot of stuff that is kind of cool to try out for educational purposes that might be best just left in the simulator, at least at first, so you don't have to buy a bunch of stuff just to try out, and then not know what to do.
Probably don't buy a name brand soldering iron, a Pinecil V2 is probably about what you want, or a random T12 station.
The current good cheap multimeter changes every week it seems, the no name stuff is always changing, IIRC right now it's the HT118 or something that a lot of people like, but I could be wrong.
Oh, and don't invent a brand new standard and decide you're going to make all your stuff compatible with it, make up a bunch of custom cables, etc. There's a high risk of being bored, or finding some new universal standard for everything, and winding up with piles of useless junk.
Just buy the parts you need for one project at a time. USB-C and barrel jacks are good. Don't use too many weird connector types, because cables take up so much space and are a really annoying kind of junk to have around.
Wagos and premade pigtails are your friend for making up adapters.
Learn the E3 resistor and capacitor values, see if you can keep to mostly just those, if you want to reduce the number of different parts you need.
Most intro tutorials don't cover a lot of this stuff I wish I had known....
If you want a gentler intro that walks you through some of the foundational concepts, Analog Devices has some great free courses on Circuit Theory:
https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/circuits#circuits...
And another great one on electronics:
https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/...
They are the best in the business at analog circuit design and A/D conversion. Worthy of your attention if you're serious about learning this stuff.
I am currently assembling his 6502 breadboard computer (with the 16 x 2 LCD character display).
Someone put together an awesome "1-100 Transistor Projects" as a PDF [2] for learning how transistor circuits work. The PDF + breadboard + a dozen or so transistors and small parts will keep you busy.
There's a sequel "101-200 Transistor Circuits" [3], one on IC circuits [4] and one on the venerable 555 timer chip [5].
The above should keep you busy for the rest of the year. If not, be sure to skim through some of the electronics hobbyist magazines [6].
[2] https://archive.org/details/1To100TransistorCircuits
[3] https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/200TrCcts/101-20...
[4] https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/100%20IC%20Circu...
[5] https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/50%20-%20555%20C...
[6] https://worldradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm
[1] https://hardwareteams.com/docs/analog/circuits-resouces/
So much nicer to grab an ardunio, motor, led, some sensors, etc...
Then graduate to esp8266/esp32.
But maybe I'm thinking embedded and my 2 years as an electrical engineer filled in some of the gaps when calculating things.
Eh, just my opinion.
That area of electronics is "modular digital electronics" and doesn't take you through the principles of basic passive components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) and then into analogue circuit theory and semiconductors, digital logic and so on.
The only thing that bugs me is when that approach is suggested as a response to 'how do I learn electronics' without any qualification or elaboration.
I havent had a reason to use my own inductor myself, but obviously plenty of components have them.
Def has digital logic, registers are a clear example of this, especially if you are going to use an esp8266 which has only a few GPIO. There have also been cases when I needed to buy and/or/not gates, but they come as ICs with the caps inside for you.
I feel like making your own logic gates is reinventing the wheel(as the link that we are commenting on suggests). Even in school, doing EE, we only spent a blip on Assembly. I spent way more time doing higher level C/C++ stuff.
"Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition"
Book by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk
Word on the street is that it can be found on https://libgen.is/
Here is a simple example: using a few discrete parts, like two transistors (Darlington pair), a LED and resistor, you can create a simple circuit that shows varying brightness of the LED depending on how close you move your hand or an object to an antenna connected to one of the transistors (forming a sort of proximity sensor). No microcontroller, SBC or even a hint of a digital signal involved at all.
Do you have some book/video/etc. recommendations for this "type" of Electrical/Electronics circuit engineering? I only know how to program a MCU :-(
Contrast that to web developers. They are dealing with very different principles from web browser developers, who are mostly working with different principles than operating system developers, who are working with entirely different principles from those who design hardware. It's not that they are working with a different subset of the same thing because one layer of abstraction is directly on top of the one below it and (ideally) the layers below completely hide how they work from the layers above.
All of electronics assumes Kirchhoff's Current Law and Kirchoff's Voltage law, which does not truly exist in reality. Electrons often escape a circuit (see antennas, which throw the voltage / current into a wave that is emitted out of your designs). All wires are antennas, so even the most basic circuit doesn't have all the current return in a loop.
The assumptions of KVL and KCL are just over-simplifications of true physics, Maxwell's equations. Because working with Maxwell's equations directly is too much effort in practice.
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Electronics itself is a huge abstraction upon physics. You could, in theory, calculate all the voltages and currents using Maxwell's equations, except this isn't useful at all.
Similarly: most of "Analog Electronics" uses simplifications as well: OpAmps are often assumed to be ideal (aka: infinite gain), which is good enough in most cases.
"Analog electronics" communicate using voltage/current/temperature/etc levels.
One of the simplest examples is a voltage divider: if you put two resistors across a DC voltage source, like this:
V+-[R1]-¢-[R2]-GND
V+ * (R2 / (R1 + R2))
I usually recommend The Art of Electronics as a well-written, beginner-friendly textbook which covers the basic concepts.
There were relays used for railroad signaling in the 19th century. Union Switch and Signal was formed in 1881. The first active electronic device, the deForest Audion, was developed in 1906.
Microwave/RF Electronics
Power Electronics
Electrical, Electronics, and Digital Hardware Essentials for Scientists and Engineers:
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Electrical,+Electronics,+and+Dig...
Also, someone suggested ‘basic electronics: theory and practice’ by Westcott & Westcott [0] for learning hobby electronics. Could someone familiar with both explain how they compare?
0: https://books.google.com/books/about/Basic_Electronics.html?...
The Westcotts' book is more practical and gets stuck in to building things more quickly. It's not a course syllabus type book and is better for the hobbyist/tinkerer working with tried-and tested, classic chips (timers, amplifiers) and platforms (Raspberry Pi, Arduino).
btw, Ed wasn't an adjunct at Berkeley. He taught at the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz _extension_ program.
Shout out to Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara, San Mateo Electronics Supply, and of course Jameco, which are still alive.
I'm also lamenting the loss of SF Bay area electronics surplus: Weird Stuff, Halted/HSC, and the latest casualty, Excess Solutions. Is there any place left around here to find used/surplus electronics?
Looks like a really cool resource if you want to do the more old fashioned analog/discrete stuff.
Definitely a lot different than what I would probably show someone if they wanted to do hobby level more modern digital work, but it seems perfect for someone who wants to do stuff with transistors and logic gates.