Electronics

Lakeland

Lakeland

Lakeland

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Joined
1 Nov 2005
Posts
5,711
I'd like to teach myself electronics! Up to now, I've built quite a few circuits, the one linked below being the most complicated. I find this sort of building ok, but it is all pre prepared and is basically just following instructions which isn't really a skill.

Image link

My aim is to be able to understand electronics to the point where I can design and then make my own circuit.

Are there any good books / video's which go into detail about basic electronics? I know bits and pieces about basic / intermediate level electronics but I don't feel I have a good enough grasp of the basics. I have researched and watched video's on youtube but most of them start at a level which is too advanced.

I'm a mechanical type of person and often find it hard to understand things which I can't see or think of as a moving part. Up to recently, I knew a transistor was a switch / amplifier, but didn't know how it worked. I recently had the theory about the semi conductor explained i.e. npn / pnp and their negative / positive charge, when a voltage is added / subtracted the silicon changes state, and now it makes perfect sense. I understand resistors and why the need for differed values, capacitors and why the need for different values but I don't know why different values are needed for certain parts of a circuit and I don't know when or how to select them. I understand diodes are to allow a current through and not to return, and are used for converting ac to dc? but I wouldn't know how to implement one. I understand, to a degree, IC's, but I can't design a circuit around one.
So to summarise, I know about the different basic components, what I don't know is how to put them together to make a circuit.

Apologies if I have waffled on, any help you could give would be greatly appreciated :)
 
Cheers Feek :) , nearly done with the build, just the transmitter section to finish. Having trouble getting a correct maximum voltage reading on a variable resistor so no progress has been made for quite a while. I'll get there eventually, It's on hold at the minute until I have spare time to dedicate, I could rush it in with an hour here and there but I want to enjoy building it if I can
 
Yes, it's worth spending the time getting it right - I quite fancy a K3 with a good transverter for 2m but realistically I can't afford it. I'm looking for a mutec front end for my old FT-736R but they're like the proverbial rocking horse droppings nowadays.

Sorry to drag this OT!
 
Thanks for the link Mickey ill check it out :)

No worries Feek, as it happens I'm building a K3 at work with Y9+Y10 radio club students. It's a nice piece of kit but as you say very expensive, even without the optional extra's, ok if you have the money to splash but not really necessary, the gains made from a K3 would be less than making / buying a better aerial. 2m is dead in the lakes, we generally stick to 20/40/80m on a 133' windom aerial hung off a 70' tower block
 
I was going to try and teach myself, I have bought -

Basic electricity book Van Valkenburgh which looks a good beginner theory book.
Art of Electronics book, Radioshack electronics learning lab and a maxitronix 300 in 1 lab.
 
Arduino is a great place to start on some basic digital circuits.

As for books, Horowitz and Hill - The Art Of Electronics is a really good, if somewhat qualitative guide to analog and digital design and analysis.
 
I can also recommend an Arduino or similar clone (I have a Freeduino). They are a great piece of kit because you can basically plug any bit of electronics into them and play around. I'm also a member of a Hackerspace in Birmingham called fizzPOP which is a group of people interested in electronics, computers and such who meet up every couple of weeks and share ideas and work on projects. There are a few more hackerspaces across the country, it's a good place to get involved if your into this sort of stuff.

I don't have any qualifications in electronics apart from a GCSE but most of my stuff was learnt from my dad, reading various things around the Internet and just playing about with it. You don't need to be an expert to have fun with it, learning is the fun part. I hope to buy a MakerBot or similar 3D printer kit in the near future as it's something that really interests me.
 
I'll send you a email with some of my uni notes attached.. they're not great in some aspects but may help so have a look and see

Picking Values- For some circuits, you just pick a value to begin with then use equations to work out the rest based on that. e.g for a opamp vout= vin * (r1/r2) so if you want the gain to =10, ie r1/r2=10, then you just pick r1 to equal a resistor value thats easy to get e.g. 47, and then r2 will have to equal 4.7


For converting AC to DC maybe try looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier Diodes rectify the voltage and capacitors are used in this case to stop the voltage from going up and down (in a curve) and instead making it a constant value(i.e a constant horizontal line at 6v) check out Rectifier output smoothing on the wiki page (capacitor value is chosen in this case to give the best output dc level)
 
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Get yourself a program called "Crocodile Clips". It lets you mock up all the circuits you design to make sure it works as you expect and nothing will blow up etc.

(i only use it for wiring LEDs up to a mains supply and watching them pop :p )
 
What sort of electronics do you want to get into? What do you want to build?

I've been messing with Microchip's Programmable Micro-controllers of late, and I think I can see one inside that K2.
 
touch said:
nothing will blow up etc.
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But that's half the fun.

Turning a virtual light emitting diode into a virtual smoke emitting diode just doesn't seem to have the same appeal as doing it for real. :D

And that's before you even start to think about light emitting pickled onions...
 
RobH said:
It's actually called Yenka Electronics now and it's completely free for home use which is cool.
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Ahhh cool, was also going to recommend crocodile clips as used this for designing circuits at college/uni before moving onto more advanced programs.

Great for logic circuit design (which is what I used it for), creating self correcting johnson counters, operational amplifiers etc.
 
I quid like the look of the Arduino, I was going to look into PIC but this looks better from a beginners point of view.

David, many thanks for the notes you have forwarded, they are at points very hard to understand but there is some very good quality notes which will help now and in the future so thank you. Just out of interest, what kind of job would you expect to get at the end of your degree?

I have crocodile clips on my pc at work, it's good for testing circuits, and making explosions but it is kind of limited if you don't know what you're doing. I've downloaded the Yenka program, after a quick look about, it appears to be very good, a mixture of crocodile clips with theory linked in.

My primary interests are audio amplifiers and radio transceivers. I'd like to progress to the stage where I can build my own amplifier, crossovers, morse/radio transceiver with audio filters. It is a big ask for me to get to that level but I will get there eventually.
 
David, many thanks for the notes you have forwarded, they are at points very hard to understand but there is some very good quality notes which will help now and in the future so thank you. Just out of interest, what kind of job would you expect to get at the end of your degree?
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Those notes I sent are complicated, so don't worry about them too much, I do 12 modules a year(so those are only for 2 modules out of the 24 I've done ) and you pick up a lot of knowledge in the other topics e.g. communications which help to understand everything else.. but there's a wide range of topics you can do with my course, from embedded programming(e.g. software for mobile phones, gps) communications(wireless or cabled) electrical(electricity generation) control systems(monitoring automated machinery) or creating electronic circuits(e.g. mobiles, friends have placements creating car tyre pressure sensors etc) trust me that's only a few of the main areas.. such a wide scope with electronics especially in the 21st century where everything is getting inbuilt electronics

Read this the other day.. About 60 million transistors were built this year [2002] ... for [each] man, woman, and child on Earth.... pretty amazing
 
Go for Arduino if you want to make projects quickly.

Go for PIC, and program using assembler if you want to learn about the Microcontroller. Once you can program the special features of the chip and make something using Assembler, switch to C.
 
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