Learn electricity and electronics fundamentals without taking a formal course
simonmonk.org
simonmonk.org
I've since lost it, but wonder if it exists on the Internet somewhere. My cursory search didn't return anything.
Otherwise, maybe you'd recognize the name as one of the other publications?
I was just blown away they send you all that material for free by simply applying. This would have been before the internet was big, so probably isn't as exciting now.
Edited for emphasis.
It was a hangover from their days a quasi-socialist, monopolistic enterprise ("We're the Phone Company"), when they could afford to be "inefficient" in that way -- scare quotes because it's difficult to calculate the cost of preparation and dissemination against all the high-value careers the material may have inspired. These days, an accountant would glance at the cost and cut it out without thinking twice.
https://archive.org/details/principlesofelec0000unse_a3j0
(AA can be searched using an archive.org file slug, e.g. "principles...a3j0", or obviously by using the title)
Not the same thing but a comment on what things were like back in the day.
Later that day I wrote the company just to let them know, thinking if others had similar issues they could investigate.
They wrote me back saying it's impossible their packs would have bones in them, and it's possible my own tooth broke/chipped and that's what I was biting, and attached a coupon for something like 35 cents off one pack.
I found the reply to be really bizarre - I'd probably rather they not responded at all.
Actually, it's happened twice, as about 15 years after that I had a bad cavity and fracture in a forward molar, and a few days before a scheduled root canal it happened again, but this time I suspected what had happened as soon as I encountered something hard all of a sudden while chewing something that shouldn't really have bits as hard as that in it.
Which is to say, their response that perhaps it was your own tooth may not have been as out of left field as you might have thought. It's probably a somewhat common occurrence.
My dad had "Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt et al., 1962. His employer put a bunch of scientists through an electronics course.
The contrast was pretty remarkable. It's all about vacuum tubes, with some introduction of transistors. The 1st edition of AoE had a reasonable amount of material on digital circuits for back then, but I imagine a similar contrast between 1984 and today.
The span of 40+ years has certainly changed how I do electronics.
AoE is extremely practical. I think the debate here is what exactly are "fundamentals" for electronics. I read AoE with high school physics and some hands on tinkering (mostly with exposure to software in embedded systems) as my background. At that point in my life I found it readable and enjoyable. It will help you get to the next level. Probably skipped some sections that weren't of interest though. I probably built my first electronic circuit in elementary school (some lights, switches, battery, etc.). If you just have no clue of anything electronics then yes, this is not the book for you. But it still is "electronics fundamentals" despite that.
It reminds me of my first time trying to learn assembly language when I was in my early teens. I just could not make any sense of it. I knew a little bit of PASCAL and BASIC at the time and that was just alien territory. When I came back a few years later after some exposure then it all came together.
Try going back to the book ;)
Your picture is simple enough; but you have mixed up dq (this is the dependent function on the Y-axis) and dt (this is the independent variable on the X-axis) infinitesimals. Their ratio is simply the instantaneous rate of change of electric charge w.r.t. time which is what is the instantaneous electric current. As to the cross-sectional area of a wire varying over its length and how it affects current through it, you can neglect it for short wires and using a specific wire gauge for all normal electronics.
> There needs to be an even more grounded book in electronics, something that you can show to a guy who literally has no idea about electronics in the slightest bit and by the end of the book, the guy is a master at it
Electronics = Physics+Mathematics+Logical Thinking and there can be no shortcuts to its study. You have to put in some effort to study the subject. However things have been simplified and modularized to such a great extent nowadays that you can learn and do a great deal without understanding much of the mathematics and physics involved. The submitted book link in this post is a good basic one to start from.
Say a roomba.
You might not know how or why each component works in detail at the end, but instead understand why the board is laid out the way it is and where each component controlling the functions and logic live, what might be broken, and whether and how to repair. I think if I were an impatient student with an interest in electronics that’s what I’d want. Then go back and study individual components, math, physics, and theory.
You could make a whole series: radio boards, home appliance boards, PC motherboards, car boards, etc.
There is plenty of material and videos on the web if you search for it; also a book The Art of PCB Reverse Engineering: Unraveling the Beauty of the Original Design by Ng Keng Tiong.
Reverse Engineering: Mechanisms, Structures, Systems & Materials by Robert Messler.
Product Design: Techniques in Reverse Engineering and New Product Development by Kevin Otto and Kristin Wood.
The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew "bunnie" Huang.
The problem you are running into is that every book starting in the late 1970s has taken the approach that you must know math intuitively to first translate the subjects being taught and to understand the modeled behaviors they represent.
Intuitive approaches have largely been ignored and avoided since then, and its acted as a gatekeeper ever since to prevent people from going into Physics, Science, and the other more technical fields.
This behavior follows practices of ideology common to gnosticism, which as a TL;DR is the idea that some people are allowed access to secret knowledge and others aren't, and only such masters can tell and determine who should have and be able to learn that knowledge. It is a completely refuted false ideology when it comes to objective reality, has no basis, and is quite evil since in practice to do this you impose a complex system of torture to ensure anyone seeking this knowledge that is deemed unworthy by some arbitrary measure is conditioned towards PTSD, just like any dystopia. They are made to believe they just aren't good at math.
This was a purposeful choice made by the boomer generation of teachers in their professions, given the widespread adoption was systematic. They simply followed what they were taught by the NEA, and that is why things are falling apart today. Knowledge of critical education was withheld, options were withheld, and by constraining thought they enforce a path of control, and the dynamics which inevitably culminate in destruction or annihilation given sufficient time because they don't stop making these changes. It gets to a point where you have people who are no better than dependent parasites on the labor of few educated, but not necessarily intelligent people. Hubris naturally occurs in such people.
The limit is also a calculus item. There is a derivative which is the instantaneous rate of change at a point (the slope is the average rate of change between two points) the single point and limit technique is always with respect to some other measure, and a integral which is the area under a curve at a single point, as the change between the points goes to 0 (i.e. a limit).
You use the delta form of the limit to calculate derivatives before you learn and have proved the shorthand methods with delta epsilon rigor. Its quite abstract, and the vast majority of the material is useless to a non-math/Engineer major. You need to understand this before you can read this.
> Does this equation actually take the effect of this fluctuation
No, the equation shown is a theoretical model, in math. In many cases, you are taught lies initially because they are simple, and a pedagogical tool called lying to children has been used since the late 70s, in various forms though wasn't called that until the 90s. Then you have to unlearn those lies as you progress through gnosis.
The best way to learn these things that I've seen that is still in use today is called Lumped Matter Discipline. It makes certain assumptions about the type of components in use to simplify the equations to basic algebra. You still need to know Calculus enough to Derive Maxwells theorems when those assumptions don't hold. One of the assumptions made is that charge buildup is 0 (iirc), in other words the second derivative, or the derivative of dQ/dt is 0, which is the acceleration or rate of rate of change.
The MIT OCW videos cover these simplifications, its dry, but its better than 99% of the other material out there aside from maybe the Oliver Heaviside Lectures at the turn of the last century which are public domain.
The flowing water pipe analogy which brainwashed/indoctrinated people use to teach is intended to purposefully mislead, maybe not by the instructor, but by the person they took it from.
Understanding the process of diffusion of charge and the need for isolation is the correct way to be thinking of these things.
If you don't know Ohm's law. You don't know what a resistor is. You've never built a simple circuit. Then this book may not be for you. Or it may if you're willing to put in the effort.
I googled and found one example: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/A...
Surely this is like recommending a Knuth book (TAoCP?) to someone wanting to learn 'CS fundamentals', which.. sure?
I’m definitely interested in more electronics books for self study though.
Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems by Jerry Twomey.
There are lots more with varying levels of basics/advanced but the above two are what came to my mind immediately for self study.
Introduction to Embedded Systems: Using Microcontrollers and the MSP430 by Manuel Jimenez et al. An excellent textbook with an emphasis on interfacing to a MCU from a hardware perspective. The chapter titled "The Analog Signal Chain" is by itself worth the price of the book.
Patterns for Time-Triggered Embedded Systems by Michael Pont. Full of C code for 8051 which you can study and then adapt to your specific MCU family. Free book available at https://www.safetty.net/publications/pttes Also checkout all of his other books since they are also full of C code examples.
It will cover all the basics. Old ones can be found on the intertubes. It is now a classical. Even used 2015 versions go for $300 dollars or more.
gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/details/neetsmodules_202003
The whole directory it's amazing too: gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/links/
Also, there's Usenet. Subscribe to to sci.electronics.repair and sci.electronics. Outdated? Delayed answers? ok, but you will get correct ones and if you set your learning at a slower but dedicated pace, with no distractions (turn the notifications off), with either PDF or Physical books and a electronic simulator like TkGate, you will get the theory at really fast speeds.
Self-promotion has even always been explicitly allowed here, but I believe the guidelines contain some verbiage to the effect of "your primary activity here should not be self-promotion". I have no official info, but just from observing things over the years, it appears that accounts who promote their own content overly frequently, and/or only post self-promotional content, are the ones that get shadow-banned or set to auto-dead status.
But it's just another book on Amazon like a dozen other books on the same subject.
I bought a new pair, but I walked away from it with more or less of a warm and fuzzy feeling that I did what I could. And a semi-decent soldering station, so next time this happens I will try again.
You summarize the past convestion in this thread. - Start with a overall summary in a single paragraph - Then show a bullet pointed list of the most interesting illustrative quotes from the piece - Then a bullet point list of the most unusual ideas - provide a longer summary that covers points not included already - Finally, Step by step/phase by phase understanding of the ideas discussed above
Mind, I don’t remember any of it, I never applied it, but at the time, it explained it to me.
To go from single transistor to multi-transistor circuits was a big leap for me, but most of it is understanding how particular subcircuits work and recognizing them as blocks of a larger circuit.
The ideas and practices of the gnostics in general are just stupid.
If you can't explain how a PN junction, or its composites actually function simply, you don't understand what you are talking about. As simply but not more simply than necessary, without using math.
He has instructions to only let cars down the major road if cars also come down the small road.
When a small trickle of cars come down the small road the intersection can act like a dimmer switch. It can also take a very small signal, and with a secondary more powerful input, amplify it.
But if you quickly alternate between no cars and lots of cars that dimmer switch acts like a toggle switch giving you 1s and 0s.
The physics is basically, when you sandwich two elements in close proximity that give up their electrons in a very specific way you get the macro phenomenon described above.
The reason the elements give up electrons this way also happens to be at the heart of a lot of cool concepts of math and is a demonstrable proof of some physics that used to be just theory. Learning the physics of transistors can teach you concepts that tie together the history of science from Ancient Greece to Quantum physics.
No signal is really “boosted” by some weird process. What happens is a very powerful DC signal (i.e constant) is selectively allowed through, being mediated by the input signal. The “volume knob” on a power amp works by ATTENUATING that constant DC signal prior to “amplification”
(I love that you’re passionate about the details and it is certainly beautiful to imagine it the way you describe. Im picturing an ocean and the mediation little birds flying down and sculpting the crests of waves. The attenuation is like the Venetian MOSE flood barriers.)
It seems like you're stuck focusing on where the energy comes from, hence wanting to talk about the "powerful DC signal" (eg power supply). But the concept of amplification says nothing about where the energy comes from - it's merely talking about the magnitude of a signal being increased. You can also say "an audio amplifier requires a power supply". Multiple concepts apply to the same situation! This is true everywhere in life, but it's easier to ignore for software and impossible to ignore for electronic design.
I think the MOSFET circuit diagram has always made more sense to me because you can see intuitively see the “plunger” as the control input.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_Awe:_The_Story_of_El...
If you really want to know how transistors work and how to use them properly it’s going to be difficult as they sit on a fairly large pile of algebra and theory. If you don’t know this you might be able to get simple circuits working by cutting and pasting bits but you won’t be able to get past that ever.
The best references on this are actually The Art of Electronics. Not necessarily the main book but the associated student manual. Also the book Experimental Methods in RF Design by Wes Hayward actually has the most useful functional description and modelling approach of transistors.
Usually I build out the DC bias model (static operating point), test it in LTspice, then add the AC/small signal model on top. Or large signal model for switching etc. Everything generally works unless I did something stupid or it’s RF where things get a little less predictable.
The answer key, unless it has changed since you wrote your comment, has the correct answer of (a) for that question (midway down page 3). You seem to have scrolled to the very end of the document which has the answers to a completely different section.
It kind of misses the point that many people actually want to know how things work and how to design and build things. This isn't going to go away.