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Methods of Learning to Build Electronic Circuitry?
Peristaltic asks: "I've seen some cool articles in Instructables detailing how to create various electronic gadgets. A couple of these as well as the odd DIY kit have come to life on my kitchen table. While it's satisfying to see the things work after time spent soldering, I would love to be able to take the next step beyond the basics of component functionality, i.e. a resistor does -this-; a capacitor does -that-. Forest Mimm's books have been helpful towards this end, but it's time to move forward. Every month or so, I read here on Slashdot a plea for help getting started with, or expanding someone's knowledge of programming. OK, I'd like to make that plea for help with electronics theory & circuit building. I've found plenty of references on the web, Amazon, etc., but can someone who's already taken this trip outline what has and hasn't worked for them?"
PIC
Programmable integrated circuit.
...Rocky's Boots - my 4 year old knew more about feedback circuits than 1/2 the engineering students in the local college.
I tinkered with electronics & "Radio-Shack" projects back in the late 1970s & early '80s and I still like to go into the local electronics stores to look around (note: NOT Radio Shack anymore). You used to be able to feel like you were doing something close to useful when you breadboarded that 555 IC alarm system, 2N222 transistor amp or got a simple 74xxx "ALU" to work, but nowadays in the 100MHz+ world (yes, I come from the days when computers ran at 5Mhz=0.005Ghz!) it is tough to tinker with anything that has any power.
The Basic Stamp kits look good. You seem to need a pretty hefty Oscilliscope nowadays also.
I would suggest taking the training for a Amature ("HAM") radio license since that involves all the basic electronics stuff, then move into more digital stuff.
TDz.
A Radio Shack 150-in-1 kit worked for me in the 70s. But given how far that place has gone downhill since that time, I would be surprised if a single employee knows his ohms and farads.
Buy The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill and also buy the lab manual. Follow through each experiment from beginning to end and you will have a very strong intuitive sense on how to design simple electronic circuits. This would be more than enough for most hobbyists (and some professionals in associated fields), but you could always just get a EE degree if you want to go further.
As an aside, the Art of Electronics book doesn't go into extreme depth on I&CE so you might want to buy some other books for that.
Horowitz and Hill: The art of electronics.
This book is pretty much the bible for Electronic Engineers, myself included. Takes you from the basics (a resistor does this etc.) as you requested up to high level stuff. Its in a pretty understandable language, and gives good examples, both of good practice and bad practice.
A good step to take would also be to familiarise yourself with a basic microprocessor too, My favourite being the venerable Microchip PIC. Good dev kits to play with for these are £100, such as the USB based PICDEM FS USB (£30), which uses the PIC18F4550, and is preloaded with a bootloader, so no need for any external programmers. Along with a good breadboard kit you could use this to produce some pretty powerful designs.
Also remember that many IC manufacturers have sampling options which for a private tinkerer like yourself you will find invaluable! Please do not abuse this system and spoil it for the rest of us though!
...breadboarded that 555 IC alarm system...
:-)
I wonder if anyone breadboards anything but the simplest circuits, anymore. If you want to do something really serious, involving some ICs with 100 pins or more, could you really do that on a breadboard?
I come from the days when computers ran at 5Mhz
Yeah... well... I come from the days when computers only ran at 1Mhz (Apple II and OSI) and we liked them!
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Experiment. Really.
I started with electronics properly in about September time. Probably the most valuable parts I have in terms of experimentation:
1. A large breadboard (the plug in type). This means you can rapidly try things out. I now have two breadboards - one small, and one large.
2. An oscilloscope. I bought a dual trace 20MHz Gould scope off an eBayer. I would have been lost without it. The dual trace is very useful too when you need to compare signals or check that things are synchronized.
3. The Internet. Seriously - some good resources:
http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ - Lessons in Electric Circuits, a free book - will get you started.
http://www.standardics.nxp.com/products/ Datasheets for every standard logic IC (4000 series and 74 series). Browse the site for chips you're interested in. They are cheap to buy from your local distributor (in Britain, you've got several choices - RS components, Maplin (a bit on the expensive side, but very fast delivery), Bowood Electronics (a superb small firm, fast delivery), Farnell (not used them yet, but they have an extensive catalogue).
http://www.wikipedia.org/ Lots of good articles. I used their article on buck and boost converters to get started on making high voltage switch mode power supplies for my first proper project.
The first thing I did on my breadboard was make simple circuits and understand them - using the versatile 555 timer, making logic gates out of discrete components, making an oscillator from transistors, capacitors and resistors. Then learned about how inductors work - how to use a small inductor to make a DC-DC converter. Comparing how bipolar transistors and MOSFETs work. Making small practical circuits like pulse generators etc. Then using logic ICs
I then built a Nixie tube display (with 7 tubes) out of raw 4000 series logic - essentially, I designed and built my own UART to receive data from a computer's RS232 port and display it on the tubes, and to be able to send data back to select what to display on the tubes. (Two pages of pictures here: http://www.alioth.net/pics/nixies/nixies.html). The nixie tube project was a great one to do as I had to learn lots of different things to be able to make it work: how to make a 170 volt switch mode power supply to the use of digital logic and how to debounce switches.
Now I've started designing and building an 8 bit computer based around the Z80, with flash ROM and static RAM plus an LCD interface etc. It actually works, too - I've got it running off a 4MHz crystal oscillator that I built. There's still a lot to learn - but I've gone from having very little knowledge of how to build electronic circuits to designing and building a simple 8 bit computer (with a keypad for input and LCD for output) in just a few months - if you're already experienced with software, learning about digital electronics is fairly natural. I can really recommend building something reasonably complex out of discrete 4000 or 74 series parts, because this is a great vehicle for learning about digital electronics, and how the real world tends to impinge on you a lot more than it does with software.
Pictures of the rat's nest of wiring that's the Z80 project is here (I've not updated it in a few weeks, I have more photos and assembler code to go in soon): http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Z80/
Why the Z80? Unlike all other processors, the Z80 has registers implemented in static memory. This means when you're experimenting, you can clock the processor arbitrarily slowly - fractions of 1Hz if you really want (or even clock it by hand). This makes early circuits A LOT easier to debug. It's not hard to program, has superb documentation free to download from Zilog. It has separate I/O
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Well, this will take time, so as long as you keep that in mind...
Resource books:
ARRL Handbook
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill
App notes from manufacturers in current interest areas
Freebie design software ( I like Altera, Analog Devices, Atmel )
Digikey catalog
Design tools:
In System Programmers's for current part interests
Assemblers, compilers, etc.
Evaluation boards for the multileaded surface mount parts ie DSP's etc.
Some PCB layout package (on linux) or web tool
Prototyping board - which is good for low frequencies
Stock up on full set of resistors 1/4 w 10 pcs per value
Caps and inductors are tricky - so you might want to buy them carefully
Good soldering station - when you get to surface mount you can thank me...
Roadmap:
Transistor diode circuits are easy, and you can analyse them by the ideal diode equation and ohms law.
Your Favorite Micro Family Here I've used Motorola(now freescale), intel, zilog, and atmel
DSP's? I've used Analog Devices, TI, and Freescale. Software tool availability and eval boards are key.
Analog circuitry has a long learning curve so I'll add to this thread later.
This is progress?
The first thing is probably to define what you want to do more specifically, i.e. what kind of electronic gadget you want to build. Try not to pick something that isn't too hard. Then you look at what other people have built and try to understand their solutions. After that you try to tweak their solutions (adding/changing stuff here and there). Repeat and rinse a few times and before you know it you'll be building your own things.
Depending on how sophisticated your education needs get, "Electronic Circuits" by Tietze and Schenk may be worthwile:k -Design-Application/dp/3540004297/sr=8-1/qid=11685 10366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-9488728-1526850?ie=UTF8& s=books ;-) more scientific.
http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Circuits-Handboo
It is a college-level textbook that focuses on the application of electronic circuits. Some advanced mathematics are required, but usually the modelling is on the simple side rather than trying to capture all the fine details.
Overall I consider it a highly useful book for designing everyday electronics. People who are working on cutting-edge technology might want something (even
C - the footgun of programming languages
I currently have an 8 bit computer breadboarded - Z80 CPU, 32K RAM, 128K flash ROM, PIO, LCD interface and keypad. Breadboarding is practical for any IC you can get in DIL packages. I'm still learning, and there are plenty of fairly complex circuits you can make on breadboard (even if they do look like a rats nest).
0 -Project-Pages/Image4.html
Most things are still available in DIL packages - the Z80 CPU and its peripheral chips are *still manufactured* in that form. Static RAM and flash ROM is easy to get hold of in DIL packages. Of course, there are mountains of 74-series and 4000-series logic and other things like 555 timers made in their tens of millions.
Here is my current rat's nest: http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Z80/Z80-Project/Z8
You probably don't want to start learning and experimenting directly with 100 pin QFPs. It would be an exercise in futility.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
No, I'm not kidding. Find a good school and go. You'll get tons of theory, and lots of hands on experience, and the opportunity to work on amazing projects with incredibly smart people. If you're really keen on it, that's what I suggest.
I got my Technology Diploma, then went on to get my BEEng. One thing I found was that the libraries and instructors usually had a stack of textbooks they were tossing and were free to whoever wants to carry them away.
Tech schools tend to be better for the practical side of things. They will teach what works. The instructors there have usually had several years out in the real world. The instructors are there to teach.
Universities teach why things work. The instructors may have had some real world experience, but they may have also spent their entire careers doing research in one form or another. The instructors are there primarily to do reasearch and get research grants. The instructors tend to lecture, not teach.
Admittedly, I have only been to one college and one university, but students I have talked to from other institutions generally agree with me. If anyone thinks I am wrong, feel free to flame away. My virtual skin can take it.
Universities do tend to offer you a higher starting wage and a more broadly acknowledged certification.
There are different catagories for different areas of the circuit board:
-Basics of LRC circuit design - Boylestead
-Controls - make motors turn and LED's blink (It's almost mandatory to have a blinking LED)
-Embedded Design - making a board work around a control chip. Try to get one that is based on an actual processor or microcontroller. To really understand how the controller works, do some basic stuff in the Assembly language for that controller. If you are trying to squeeze every clock cycle out of your controller or are limited for program space, do as much as you can in Assembly, otherwise there are good IDE's for PIC and Atmel that I have seen.
Eagle CAD is available for free for non-commercial use from cadsoft.de It can be a pain, but free is much cheaper than Altium's package. If there are better free packages, POST IT HERE!
Try to keep your boards single-sided if you can. Mount your components on the side away from your traces. It makes it harder to roast them with your soldering iron. Toaster ovens (with some themal controls) do well for budget surface-mount boards.
An easy way to put the traces onto your board is to print a mirror image of your layout onto ultra-gloss photo paper with a laser printer. Gently use a clothes iron to transfer the toner to the copper-clad board. Use etchant as normal and clean with alcohol.
Good Luck!
The nose doesn't cause the tail.
Why do you need to tinker with anything that has "power"? A Z80 CPU is still as good today as it was 20 years ago (and they are still made - they are popular in embedded applications, which was after all what they were originally designed for). You can make plenty of useful devices with a 4MHz PIC or a 4MHz Z80. If you're making embedded computers, they simply don't NEED the power of a modern desktop CPU. I think people forget this and get dragged on with the marketing myth that everything needs a 1GHz+ processor when it simply doesn't. A 4MHz Z80 will still barely work up a sweat as part of say, a logging weather station. Which is a good thing because you want the battery to last.
74 series and 4000 series logic, 555 timers and the like are STILL as much fun to play with as they were 20 years ago. The existence of 3.6 GHz Xeon processors does not reduce the amount of learning or fun you can have from these parts, nor does it make simple parts any less useful than they ever were. You can still make useful gadgets with simple parts, and it's not hard to interface them with a modern desktop computer if need be.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Lots of suppliers and circuits
http://www.makezine.com/
Lots of suppliers and circuits
http://www.nutsvolts.com/
Online textbook
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
Forum
http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/index.php
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Also, decide early on if you want to get into analogue circuitry or if you're more interested in digital. It's two different worlds which ain't got much in common. The trend is that more and more circuits are digital. Even if the end-output or the inputs are analogue, that's often converted to/from digital and the rest done digitally.
I've just completed a electrical engineering degree, and I can't stress how important the fundamentals are. This online book got me through the first 2 years of my degree:
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
Knowing exactly what each component does, and what effect it has when combined with other components is paramount to understanding more complex circuitry. Even in a digital system there is a chuck of analogue stuff which will really confuse you if you don't know what it does (and whether it affects the operation of the digital part).
Apart from the basics, the rest is all exposure really. Finding out how some effect is created, what techniques they've used, why they work the way they do, you'll learn all of this as you are exposed to more and more circuitry. You will definitely get overwhelmed if you try and learn everything though. For basic exposure an undergrad introduction textbook will serve you fine, once through that find out what your really interested in and read the recommended textbooks from any university.
Just fyi, in my electrical degree there are about 5 streams which you can specialise in, each which take about 2 years of concentrated study. And that's just at undergraduate level! (I'm in australia and our university system is different to that of the US, an undergrad ee degree is 4 years straight out of high school)
It's in every second post right now, but yes, get this book.
Choosing PIC for your first uC is like making a life-time commitment in childhood, such as priesthood or professional musician career.
If you do, later you won't want to (maybe even couldn't) use any other uC architecture.
If you don't, later you won't want to (maybe even couldn't) use PIC architecture.
PIC will bite your hand as soon as you try anything a bit more complex with it. It was designed for small, simple, fast, embedded in "smart peripheral IC" applications but it overgrew itself since.
Alas, being so "like no other" uC (um, well, 8051 is "like no other", PIC is "OMFG! Whaaa!"), it demands a lot of self-investment to master it, so developers who grow emotional attachment to it often use it even in applications where it doesn't fit well.
Besides, masoch^W hackers' pleasure is amplified by the fact that virtually no software is easily migrated from another architecture to PIC, so it is common practice to code everything from scratch, YOUR way, woohoo!.
Whatever you learned in CS lessons... forget it (Yes! Up yours, pie eaters! Brains above Knowledge). Consequently, tools for other architectures... are quite different (if they exist) for PICs.
Extreme effort needs extreme people (but we like to call ourselves OUTSTANDING instead of extreme. Others calls us "Damn over-self-esteemed sparkies who think they can code"), so PIC coders are known as most zealous among the global community of arcane small-uC assembly language initiates. Never wave an AVR in PIC-coders face, and never ever bring up Freescale 68*08 if you are wearing new clothes! C programming is for sissies and besides, why yes, we DO have C compilers for PIC!
No Forths, though, duh! (that was a scary thought: UFOs are probably controlled by Forth running on PICs... all encoded in ternary logic, of course)
"-1, Lethal," I think. 8) Seriously, even with my very limited understanding I can say, don't try this at home.
Revive the Constitution.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Most of what we used to do with electronic circuits is now done with some kind of processor. Convert the signal to digital, process it and convert back to analog. With that in mind, I recommend the Arduino project. www.arduino.cc The heart of the project is an inexpensive board based on an Atmel chip (similar to a PIC). It is easy to program in C++ and it has interfaces to all kinds of multimedia and web based programs. It is completely open source, even the board design.
The other thing that has worked for my family is the venerable Radio Shack 150 kit. Figure out what you want to do, find one of the project kits that sort of does that and adapt it. The joy of this approach is that you start out with a working circuit. String a couple of circuits together and you have a working system. Design the board in Eagle, send the files to one of many board services and get the board back in a couple of days.
Consumer electronic devices are very cheap. Kludging them into your project can save a lot of misery. My daughter wanted to control 120 vac. The solution was to take a small module that used a photocell to turn lights on and off and control it with a LED. The solution was quick, easy and a lot safer than if she'd tried to build the whole thing from scratch.
It's a win/win situation.
I can write such shit because it makes fun of the people who live in a evil country.
If you can't find it in a DIL (or DIP) then digkeyhttp://www.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksu s.dll?Criteria?Ref=33490&Site=US&Cat=34079261 sells adapters. Many manufactures will also send you a few samples of chips for development work, they generally send you ~5 of any sub $15 chip for free (including shipping). Maximhttp://www.maxim-ic.com/ is one of the best for sending out free samples quickly, but analog deviceshttp://www.analog.com/, and just about any of the others send out freebees as well.
There is little that can be said, other than just make stuff. Most components are cheap- find some local surplus place or just learn to pull parts off of old PCB boards. When it comes to the fundamentals, at this stage, make sure you understand Ohms law (V=I*R). Ohms law is behind *everything* in electronics, not just DC. AC makes it more complicated (with AC R is a "complex" value, otherwise termed as Z, or impedance, which is where capacitance and inductance come in). No matter what, the voltage is equal to the product of the current and impedance.
If you measure something and it doesn't make sense... most likely you didn't make some ground breaking discovery- it is probably a problem with your understanding of the circuit, or a limitation of your tool- A prime example of this is measuring with a scope- a scope has limited bandwidth- if you try to measure a 100 MHz signal with a 20 MHZ analog scope, you won't see anything- it isn't the circuit that is broken, it is a matter of not using the appropriate tool for the job. Digital scopes have their own issues- the biggest one being aliasing. Since the inputs usually have a much wider bandwidth than the sampling rate (with no anti-aliasing filters), you can get *really* confused.
If it doesn't make sense, find out why!
Getting an EE degree is a good way to learn about electronics, but frankly, just a part of the journey. I've seen way too many EEs that don't know which end of a soldering iron to grab. (I have a BSEE ('91), a MSEE ('97), electronics is a vocation and an avocation for me.) A degree, by itself, won't get you there- the best resource is a mentor (also known as an 'Elmer' for the ham radio types).
I was once in your position -- although you seem to have had more early success than I did. I can still remember the first kit that I built that actually *worked*. The key was taking my time and being meticulous about component identification and soldering. After that, I took every opportunity I could to learn how things worked -- you end up stealing a lot as a designer, after all, if it worked for the other guy, it should work for you. Now, everything I take apart, I try to identify the parts and figure out what they do, and *how* they do it. Then, I ask myself: "why did they do it this way, instead of some other way?" You can learn a lot from analyzing others' designs.
Books:
Horowitz and Hill
ARRL Handbook
Tools - Get yourself a really *good* soldering station. I like the old Weller WTCP* series, but anything that comes in two pieces (a transformer/power unit and an iron) should do. Plan on spending US$150 or so on it (or get one used). Same for your pliers and cutters -- spend good money on good tools...you won't regret it.
CAD - for schematics and circuit boards, I like expresspcb.com -- the software is free, but only works with their internet PCB service. I have heard good things about Eagle, too, but you will need to do more work to get a PCB made. EpressPCB is fast and easy. Linear Technology has a free PSPICE -- they call it SwitcherCAD III -- http://linear.com/company/software.jsp
It's free if you register. You can build circuits and simulate them...takes a bit of getting used to, but once you figure it out, you can try different components and see what happens in a simple (or complex!) circuit. Pretty much any PSPICE tutorial book will help you get started. SwitcherCAD and ExpressPCB will also run on Linux under Wine.
Ham Radio groups. These are people who like to play with radios. Occasionally, you will find a "QRP" group, where the guys get their kicks from *building* their own radios and test gear. There's a lot of help available for the beginner. Search for QRP-L, NORCAL and NJQRP on Google. They publish newsletter with circuit designs and descriptions, and do group projects, where you send in a nominal amount (US$20 or so) and get back a PCB and a bag of parts.
Get some busted piece of electronics and fix it. I recently bought a Tektronix 475 scope and have certainly learned quite a few things about circuits while troubleshooting it. I already rebuilt the 5V power supply (the scope was partially salvaged for parts) and found three bad transistors and two leaking capacitors. It is now up to the point where I can see decent waveforms on the screen at some sweep settings. The trace is still fuzzy and the sweep board is very buggy, so there is plenty of work left. This is all much easier than you think, as the circuit diagrams are available in the manual. Naturally, you'll need to get some theoretical background first, so you have some idea about what to look for; that's what Horowitz and Hill are for. You'll also need some equipment; a soldering station, a multimeter, and a cheap scope (I have a Tek 453, which, IMHO is a much better quality instrument than the 475, which is starting to show signs of the cheap revolution).
The 8051 is still around too, and is still under active development. No more eprom programmers & UV erase lamps. They have 1 clock cores now, where 20Mhz = 20 MIPS. You can program them with a parallel port dongle. Some of the advanced ones program via a bootloader ROM. The AT89C51ED2... Hold reset, tap PSEN, release reset, and talk to it via the serial port. Atmel FLIP is available for Linux. GPL SDCC for C afectionados.
The Intel MCS-52 BASIC is available from numerous sites, one of which has enhanced it to work on a modern chip with internal RAM (like the above mentioned ED2). In 12 cycle mode, it can run 60Mhz. Try that with a Basic Stamp!
Then there's the AVR's. Better arch for C compilers, but single source.
Avoid PIC's. Their arch is straight from the mid 1970's. Not orthoganal at all, oddball word sizes, instruction extensions, and 10,000 different chips to choose form.
"Yeah... well... I come from the days when computers only ran at 1Mhz (Apple II and OSI) and we liked them! :-)"
:). I taught myself applesoft basic by programming Conway's game of life that I had read about in SA, where that lead distracted me from electonics for a couple more decades.
:)
There were no IC's in my electronics kit, but there was enough to build a "transistor radio", I turned into a teenager and didn't bother with electronics until my mid-twenties. I got hold of a second hand Apple 11, attached an audio cassett player, my monitor was "the" TV plugged in via the RF converter in "the" video recorder (luckily the wife liked reading and the kids were young
In case I decide to take it up in retirement, does anyone know a cheap way to make a 4-way mobile platform for an automotron?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You forgot another reason why these older devices are worth serious consideration: Cost.
A Z80 is not only likely to be powerful enough for your project, it's also dirt cheap (About $5 each.) A Motorola 68K will cost under $15. Of course, there are modern variations with some extra features, so price for a specific sub-breed may vary.
I'm a fan of the 8051-decended microcontrollers, since they greatly reduce the number of support components (on-chip oscillator circuits). Flash based EEPROM units go for about $7 each or less, can be clocked at anything between 0Hz - 24MHz, and come with a plethera of features depending on model: integrated A/D & D/A converters, USB host interfaces and PWM generators being popular.
You definately do not need a $300, 150-million-transistor space heater for most embedded applications.
=Smidge=
I completely agree, there's nothing wrong with simpler chips, there's no real need for 100Mhz+ devices in your projects unless it calls for them. You don't pick some high speed piece of kit and thinking of something to do with it (that's a totally wrong approach IMO). You should be thinking of an application and then build the circuit to fit your application. You need to find a problem and develop a solution, not have a solution and try to find a problem it might fix. Choosing to use simple through hole logic circuits, or microcontrollers as opposed to modern high speed surface mount devices should be a decision you make based on the problem you're trying to solve... and there are quite a few problems that can be solved with simple circuits.
To the OP: As someone who has already gone down that road (from following pre-planed projects to building my own custom stuff)... There is just one simple factor to do...
Decide what you want to do (define your "problem) and then build it (develop the "solution").
Today I basically have an idea for something I want to build, and then I begin figuring how I can accomplish that using the individual part data, usually from simple chips like 74XXX and 555s to more complex chips like Basic STAMP and PIC chips. Most often I choose projects that I feel are just a hair out of my range and I learn some new skills along the way.
I've been working on many little projects but my last BIG project was an adapter that allowed you to use a Sega Saturn controller on an Xbox 360. I had limited microcontroller experience so I learned about them, figured out which one would best suit my needs, and costs, and then I learned the assembly language used to program it. I also learned a lot about multiplexers (and why they wouldn't work for what I was trying to do). But that project like many others weren't following any kind of guide, and they weren't based on something someone else had already done. I find developing a circuit similar to piecing together a puzzle, you have an idea if which pieces might fit where and you might have a few holes in your design and then hunt around for pieces that might fit that you didn't know about, expanding your knowledge along the way.
Basically just learning what the function, capabilities, and limits of number of electronic components do is the first step. Once you have those in your pocket you can start to utilize them for something unique. Like the words of a foreign language... now all you have to do is think of something creative to say. It's not anything you'll learn from a book, because the next step is be creative and think of something to build.
Collector's Edition
I recomend a book by Forest Mims called Getting Started in Electronics. It's a great book for teaching electronics to non Electrical Engineering majors. We actually used it as a text book one year for an Instrumentation class.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
If you are keen on learning how to program on microcontrollers and write your own firmware, try the Texas Instruments MSP430. For starters, MSP430F1121 or MSP430F1232 (1232 has an ADC - analog to digital converter - you can get a thermistor and another resistor, and make yourself a digital thermometer that will connect to your PC via a serial port). A slightly more advanced one is the MSP430F149 (more RAM, more ROM). All three of these have some flash memory too. Yahoo has a group dedicated to TI's MSP430.
For development on it, try the open source MSPGCC compiler/debugger.
Once started with that, you can explore some other TI ICs. In my opinion, they have very good documentation, which is absolutely necessary to get things to work. I design electronics for a living, and the MSP430 is always the first choice for a microcontroller. If you browse their website, or even others (ST, National..) you will find a lot of application notes with sample circuits which do one thing or another. (if you want to do some USB stuff, FTDI make very easy to use ICs)
Without saying, the best way to learn about it is to dig in. Datasheets and application notes are your bible, and you will learn a lot from them. As someone already said, all large manufactures will give out samples. Use it, as it will make it a whole lot cheaper.
There is a BIG difference between being able to design a circuit on paper (or SPICE) and actually being able to put components together and make them work in the real world.
While the basics of design can be learned from books (another plug for the "Art of Electronics" and the ARRL handbook here), when you go to actually put your creation into physical form, you are dealing with mechanical skills (soldering, PCB fabrication, wiring harness fabrication, chassis/packaging work, etc.)that can only be learned through practice. And troubleshooting problems that have their roots in the "grey area" between how circuits act in theory and real world considerations like EMI/RFI, parasitic reactances, heatsinking, etc. will be a real steep learning curve. Bob Pease's book "Troubleshooting Analog Circuits" is a good read, even if you want to work with digital logic (which is actually analog on the fundamental level anyway).
A good way to learn what works and what doesn't is to tear apart as many different pieces of junked electronics as you can (every good hardware hacker needs a "junkbox" to scrounge bits and pieces from), and pay attention to the way components are laid out, mounted, cooled, etc. Get a feel for track widths and ground planes used on PCBs in different types of circuitry. Observe how minor differences in layout and construction can effect ease of troubleshooting/repair. If you can get some surplus industrial/military gear to tear apart, you can compare it to typical consumer electronics, to see how designing for the cheapest price point effects component selection and packaging decisions.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
How can one get started in Electronics on a budget? The parts are cheap enough, but it seems like you would have to keep a stock of thousands of parts to actually be able to throw something together.
> In case I decide to take it up in retirement, does anyone know a cheap way to make a 4-way mobile platform for an automotron? :)
There is a robotics company called Vex that makes kits with all the necessary parts. It's like an erector set with a radio control unit and motors, but more sturdy. My nephews use them in high-school robotics club for competitions.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
and at least half my stuff was working to some degree by the time I was almost 13 and killing transistors.
the demise of popular electronics and the slate of similar magazines, in which you had both semi-interesting one or two element circuits to learn off of as welll as more advanced functional items is badly missed. as is heathkit. junko heathkits like the $8 learn to solder kit are selling at a 2-1/2 times premium unopened on eBay. items like the SB-2xx ham linear amps, unopened, sell well over a thousand bucks. the "220" was a $350 kit back in the day.
there are plenty of sites with a little information, but it's not pulled together like it once was. the guru's lair site, http://www.tinaja.com/default.asp , last redoubt of the venerable don lancaster, has some interesting stuff, but mostly it's his experiments on postscript and stuff like that from almost 20 years back.
mostly what's out there new and fresh is basic stamp and PIC projects. advanced stuff at www.circuitcellar.com , which should be familiar to those old Byte-hounds in the audience.
no good parts sources in the twin cities, for instance, that you can rely on, since AEI moved out of downtown mpls. you have to use www.digikey.com and www.mouser.com for much of anything, as well as specialty places like www.rfparts.com and www.tubesandmore.com .
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Just make sure you discharge the CRT, and then I actually think this is a pretty good idea.
Maybe I'd better include this though
How to discharge a CRT:"
Make certain to wash your hands after you're through, and don't forget to tip.
Here's an amazing little gadget someone built with a breadboarded Z80 and some rolls of tape and such: http://users.adelphia.net/~silvan/z80.avi
While many solders out there do not contain lead, most do; even the ones that don't contain lead have flux which is pretty unhealthy.
So, don't solder on your kitchen table. And always always always wash your hands after you solder.
Comedy is Tragedy that happens to others.
I would argue it's worth the extra few bucks to get the best chip out there in the series. For example, if you go PIC, get the best PIC you can handle. It is very frustrating to find out you can't extend your project to include FLASH memory just be cause you skimped on the memory or number of ports.
The practical limit I tend to draw is with pin numbers- if I need 28-pins for the initial project, I get the best 28-pin device I can. It's not like you're going to production where every dollar counts, and for the extra $10 if you can save one hour of frustration you're ahead.
Cheers,
Greg
Comedy is Tragedy that happens to others.
hit the surplus stores, look for fusty old board with wire-and-hole components, preferably with enough component sticking out the back side to poke holes and make your hands bleed. excellent source of salvage parts. you also want a desolder bulb so you don't heat the parts up so much that they drift out of tolerance. many a project have we all built with salvage stuff.
test when you pull, so you're not keeping crap that doesn't work, and building projects with crap that cannot work.
and then, of course, there is faking it.
you can always series resistors to get odd values (120 + 120 + 100 = 320 ohms) and parallel them as well (120 || 120 = 60), although the math gets a little more than four operators with more than two parts.
capacitors in parallel provide more capacitance at the same voltage (20 || 20 || 20 = 60 uF) and capacitors in series provide less capacitance but more voltage (20 + 20 at 450 volts = 20 uF at 900 volts).
the transistor battles... basically, 2N3904 and 2N3906 will replace just about all small-signal NPN and PNP applications, except way at the edges of the bell curve when you are looking for lowest noise. MPF102 is the universal JFET.
a good DMM with a capacitor meter built in, doesn't necessarily have to be a fluke, is the most important test equipment you can start with, for it allows you to build a junkbox. we're at the point where a scope is real close to the second most important piece of test equipment, and nothing below 20 MHz is worth thinking about. I got a nice dual-trace Tek digital storage scope at 100 MHz off eBay for around $150 a year or two ago, and it works great. get some $25 dock-sweepings probes from a mail order outfit and you're set.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I meant (120 + 100 + 100 = 320 ohms.) generally, the difference would not matter in a well-designed circuit, tolerances of 20% were common until transistors, when 10% was the norm. but it's useful to get it right and reduce the number of errors in a row, which might tip the balance between a working project and a paperweight.
sigh. you should not be surprised that this becomes a big factor if you get deeply invested in something and work through the night building it, then work through two nights debugging it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The fastest, most intricate wire-wrap board I recall seeing was a prototype of the first Apple PowerPC based computer. I forgot the title of the movie it was in, maybe someone here remembers?. The complexity of it was jaw dropping, I never knew you could do something so complex and fast with wire-wrapping.
Radio Shack seemingly has stripped away all but tools, connectors and power supplies. They have very little in the way of chips or transistors.
If you want to dig into electronics you have several directions to go-- amature robotics (feedback and control ciruits, sensors & programming), microcomputers (straight digital stuff usually), alarm systems (digital/analog hybrid), radio transmission and/or reception (mostly analog unless you dig DSP [digital signal processing]), computer interfacing through a board- home automation anyone? or even R/C planes or boats (modelling mixed with proportional controls)which is similar to what's happening in controllers for model trains these days.
The ARRL yearly big book is a great overview of electronics by elementary theory and keeps up with what's available on the market as the years change. It tends towards ham radio, of course, but the basics of the field are there, and have been fine-tuned over the years.
Jameco corporation is fast and fairly comprehensive as to general interest components and covers all above except R/C planes. Their catalog comes out frequently. One of the big book shops is Mouser. They market towards the professional field but they have no minimum order that I know of. You'd better know what you're looking for, though. The catalog is huge. Good luck, and have fun!
(ham radio kits are like high-tech version of fly-tying--meticulous work with amazing results.)
I agree, just b/c PCs run at 3GHz today, your dining room creations don't need to. You also should be more specific. What is you background now? Are you a programmer? Are you interested in digital or analog electronics? How much money do you want to put into the hobby? The money part is pretty important, b/c it will dictate the equipment you will have. Electronics hobbyist cover the spectrum of a $5 radio shack soldering wand and components robbed from discarded equipment, to high dollar equipment bought at surplus auctions. For the digital domain, it makes sense to use a microcontroller, b/c it cuts down on component count as compared to logic chips. For a $230 you can get a Microchip ICD2 and development board from www.digikey.com, P/N DV164006-ND. Microchip has a very good user community at http://forum.microchip.com/. If you want to spend less money, there are many plans on the web for do it yourself bootstrap programmers for PICs. I reccomend the ICD2 if you can afford it. It supports a very wide range of parts from Microchip, and the development board will save you a lot of time in building. In the analog domain, the operational amplifier is the heart electronics. A great place to start, if you have not already, is to build math functions with op-amps... dividers, multipliers, integrators, et. As you perfect different analog circuits, you can start to combine them into larger circuits. Depending on the money your willing to invest, there a lot of good books available. The first I would suggest, and I've seen it in other posts in the this thread, is The Art of Electronics. It's a good general reference. Also, it can't be overstated, the wealth of information available on the web in the form of manufacturers datasheets and application notes. www.national.com is a good place to start looking for datasheets. They have some really good online tutorials, check out there analog university, http://www.national.com/AU/. Wikipedia links to some good resources as well in their electronics articles.
You people and your slight differences disgust me! - Prof. Farnsworth
Try the famous P. Horowitz & W. Hill "The Art of Electronics". Great amount of theory with emphasis on UNDERSTANDING how circuits work and DESIGNING them, without counting every single possible value on your calculator. First book covers the basics and analog electronics, the second one covers logical circuits and digital electronics in general.
Oh, and even if You want to program microcontrollers, you'd still need at least some theory to really understand what you're doing.
If you use the pre-cut and bent jumpers properly, almost everything should be flush with the board, not a rat's nest.
This book was based off the one-semester course Physics 123 taught at Harvard. In the course itself, which is taken by people of all majors, you design and build all kinds of things like radio receiver and transmitters, amps, filters, and after maybe 4-5 weeks you actually design and build a circuit to take an audio signal, figure out a way to transmit it via infrared diodes, receive it with infrared photodiodes across the room, and rebuild the audio structure and play back on a speaker. This was satisfactorily done in the class by psychology majors with absolutely no prior electronic or much physics background. If they can do it, you can.
The second half of the book (and the course) is digital electronics, culminating in the building of a 68008 digital computer with a motherboard-based breadboard. People have gone on to add things such as putting two DACs and feeding the output to an oscilloscope to draw pictures, and programming the CPU to make a PacMan game, for example. Really wild stuff.
The book is awsome, it starts with resistors, then capacitors, and goes on to transistors, and then op-amps, going from ideal to real-world structures. And you really only need some high-school level algebra to follow it. The reading is not dry at all, the authors actually make it interesting to read.
The only criticism I ever heard about this book was by a guy with a masters in Electrical Engineering who commented that one of their circuits wouldn't work in the high-Megahertz range and was a faulty design, and said much of their stuff isn't high-end design. This guy has a masters degree, and spent 6 years of education taking advanced EE courses, so if that's his critique of the book then you can bet that for people trying to go from nothing to complicated systems it's a great book.
make world, not war
you can get a decent bit of components for about 200 bucks by buying various sizes of resistors, LEDs, and some 'grab bags' of stuff from online electronics store.
scavenging stuff works sometimes too, especially for switches. a 'desoldering' tool is helpful.
The US Navy has a series of electronics books called the "NEETS" series. It's what I used when I was in the US Navy. You can find them on EBay, or on many bittorrent sites as a burnable CD/DVD with more interactive content. They're not perfect, but they have great explanations and examples for you to learn. They were designed for people who had no electronics background, but wanted to get an electronics rating/job in the military.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
And if you have some money to spare and some experience, you could get some sensor nodes, lik e.g. Crossbow's MicaZ series with some data acquisition boards and solder away. That gives you electronics to play with and programming fun.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
These little chips are a fun and cheap way to combine basic programming and electronics. They're also quite powerful. Very few parts are required to program a picaxe - another bonus. Have fun and learn by playing! http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/
The basics (at least two of these, IMHO):
Magazines: Nuts and Volts, Circuit Cellar, various UK mags, Everyday Practical Electronics
Get some basic parts via mail order, and start experimenting.
You can buy a few over-priced parts from places like Radio Shack (US), The Source (CAN), or Maplins (UK), or you can get them via mail order from places like Jameco, Mouser, DigiKey (those are all in the US, but work well for Canada as well), and UK suppliers, and Jaycar in Australia.
Some additional links and ideas from my own blog,
Online Resources, Learning about Electronics and Antennas, and Learning about Microcontrollers.
And, when you've tinkered enough and want to learn how things like transistors *really work* (instead of just plugging together building blocks you've found elsewhere: Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics" is the canonical guide/desk reference. It's pretty enjoyable reading if you like this sort of thing.
[
You are now set to work your way through Grob. Once finished you will have the ability to design and build your OWN power supplies and you will have a thorough understanding of DC and AC circuits.
From that point you can begin to study discrete gates and Integrated Circuits such as Op-Amps, 555 timers and the like.
Oh, yeah, one other thing; when you have finished Grob you will really be ready for The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill. And yes, buy the lab manual.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
A good introduction to the subject, an available for free at:
http://www.tpub.com/content/neets/
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of EE design outside of PICs and microprocessors, Hambley was my text book for several of my undergraduate classes. It will tell you everything you wanted to know (and some stuff you didn't) about MOSFET/BJT physics and design.
For a more info and practice with more basic stuff (resistor networks, AC and DC fundamentals, etc) try Robbins and Miller. I used this one throughout my first year.
Most of my Optoelectronics senior project was design work from Hambley. Bounce a laser off a window into a home made phototransistor, two gains stages, one push-pull amplifier stage, and you get a fully functional laser snooping device. Nothing like listening in on the professors in their offices.
I think I must disagree. You aren't going to make a modern desktop computer with these, but there's an incredible amount of things you can do with something that appears limited at first.
I'm doing plenty with a 20MHz 8-bit PIC chip with "only" 8k of code space. I can and have controlled a character LCD display, read a keypad, read an encoder, operated a motor with velocity and position control, done RS-232 serial i/o for control by a PC, and some rudimentary task switching, doing floating point operations with no FPU, all in the same chip at the same time. I'm making a similar project that can operate up to 16 radio-control servos at the same time, as well as doing some of the above tasks. Several of these features might only need an afternoon or a day to implement the first time, and once designed, is easy to re-use for other projects.
I've even used an 4MHz eight pin chip as the operating core of a product using less than 50 assembler instructions.
Try here.
The site is a litle bit awkward, frames and all, but it has everything explained: resistor ICs, cpu memory, etc and with animations!
One cant ask for more. good luck.
Is this
In terms of schematic capture packages, I've used Eagle from cadsoft (http://www.cadsoftusa.com/ and am very fond of it. The free version will let you do plenty, although I use the profesional version (for work, I didn't buy it myself). There are also free software versions out there, but I haven't used them and can't comment on how well they work, but I'd encourage you to check them out.
(And that's "Printed Circuit Board", not "Polychlorinated Biphenyls"!)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Perhaps it was Triumph of the Nerds? I think I remember Andy Hertzfeld holding it up. I'm not sure where you could possibly buy it, but there are torrents out there.
Like other people said: once Mimms is easy, Horowitz and Hill. I've learned a lot from epanorama's tutorials, and some from web-ee -- both are collections of other sites.
But my strongest advice would be: figure out what you want to do and focus on that. Saying you want to learn more about electronics is like saying you want to learn more about languages -- and you can do that, it's called linguistics, but if you want to learn a language that's a different proposition.
If you're an audiophile, learn about amplifiers: concentrate on analog and find some older books about tubes.
If you're into automation, learn about interfacing: some digital, some transducers, don't sweat transistor theory or analog stuff much.
If you're into programming, spend your time on digital and get a cheap PIC programmer.
Just don't try to teach yourself everything. You'll only become frustrated.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Anybody remember the Allied electronics catalog? the thousands of pages of parts, tubes, etc.
How about Heathkits? I really loved building them when I was a kid!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
OK, I promised to get back to the analog stuff, so here it is ...but first...
Digital EE time to mastery 5 yrs
Analog EE time to mastery 7-10 yrs
Radio Frequency EE time to mastery 15 yrs
Video EE time to mastery 20 yrs
Why the difference?
Analog has everything depending on everything else, and it's a constant tradeoff. Finding the sweet spot in the design is iterative. Take good notes...
RF design needs physical understanding of parasitics - a cap might look like an inductor, an inductor like a cap, if the frequency is high enough so the part is outside of its happy place.
Or, either could resonate like crazy.
And a wire is not a wire, it's a transmission line, with weirdness of its own. Look up Smith Chart.
The RF field will happily couple to anything else, unless or until you used buried microstrip, or lots of ground planes for the rf energy to go to.
To add to the fun, a transistor or circuit may oscillate at a much higher frequency then you expected, and you might not know its there.
Until the part burns up.
You will learn about ferrites, and why, when they are referred to as "magic pixie dust" the RF guy is actually serious.
EMC compliance engineers count as RF guys, too.
Be nice to them, they are usually called in after the s**t hit the fan.
As an aside, count on 10% above the naked system cost for EMC magic. Knowing about the evil reduces it somewhat, and gives you faster time to market.
You also will not find your EMC guy/manager/CEO with a voodoo doll with your name on it
Power engineers, especially at the bleeding edge also can count as RF engineers
Consider designing electronics that sit on 1 MV power lines, and have to survive lightning strokes.
That leaves the video engineer
Don't just think television, think 5 GHz oscilliscopes.
How would you like to design a circuit with flat gain and phase from DC to daylight?
All the horrors you can imagine, and all those that are just waiting for Mr. Murphy to show up.
This is progress?
I tinkered with electronics & "Radio-Shack" projects back in the late 1970s & early '80s and I still like to go into the local electronics stores to look around (note: NOT Radio Shack anymore). You used to be able to feel like you were doing something close to useful when you breadboarded that 555 IC alarm system, 2N222 transistor amp or got a simple 74xxx "ALU" to work, but nowadays in the 100MHz+ world (yes, I come from the days when computers ran at 5Mhz=0.005Ghz!) it is tough to tinker with anything that has any power.
The Basic Stamp kits look good. You seem to need a pretty hefty Oscilliscope nowadays also.
I would suggest taking the training for a Amature ("HAM") radio license since that involves all the basic electronics stuff, then move into more digital stuff.
TDz.
I also got my start at the Radio Shack at the local mall, early-'70s, as a kid. I was first hooked by the quite nice shortwave receiver on display, and actually hooked up to a decent antenna. I would spend nearly the entire time at the mall there tuning around as my parents shopped. I then started looking at the kits...which back then were much more extensive than the offerings at R.S. nowadays.
My parents were struggling...we had little money. The store manager saw my interest, and after talking to both I and my parents over a number of weekend mall visits, started offering to let me take kits home to build for store display, in exchange for basic tools, soldering iron, small volt-ohm meter, etc.
From there, I went into amateur radio. The ARRL books, especially the ARRL Handbook, are a treasure-trove of electronic knowledge and information. Many may scoff, but for learning basic electronics skills, especially analog, vacuum tube circuit projects have quite a few advantages over starting with I.C.s and transistors.
The size of components and pins allow for nascent soldering skills to develop without frying delicate solid-state parts. The same with wiring a circuit correctly, (although connecting a polarized high-voltage electrolytic capacitor in reverse can be quite spectacular..KA-BOOM!) most mistakes result in either a blown fuse or simply a non-functioning circuit with little damage, possibly a fried resistor. Solid state components are not nearly so forgiving.
The higher voltages also train one in proper safe live-circuit handling and testing, in a painful but usually harmless and quite memorable way. Naturally, that applies to small-signal type circuits like preamps and such, where voltages and currents encountered are minimal (although painful). Power amps and similar circuits have lethal currents and voltages and should be handled with extreme caution, and with another person present in the case of novice electronics hobbyists.
The knowledge and skills I gained in learning vacuum tube circuit basics helped tremendously when transitioning to solid state analog circuitry. There are still applications in which vacuum tubes are superior to their solid state brethren, most notably in hgh-end audiophile sound systems and guitar and bass amplifiers. I currently build custom vacuum tube guitar and bass amplifiers part-time, and hope to expand to a full-time buisiness.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
MIT Open Courseware
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you've got the time and money and a community college nearby, you might be able to get into a 1 year electronic servicing program and get a good grounding in the basics. After that you'll be able to teach yourself without letting the magic smoke out of quite so many components.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Don't forget RF as an introduction to electronics. If you want to know about series and parallel circuits and light bulbs, stick with DC and batteries. You mentioned capacitors and other components...understanding the behavior of RF circuits is part and parcel of understanding what a capacitor is for. Even digital designers need to know about RF circuits, so starting there can complement the understanding you probably already have of digital logic from programming.
Of course, I think the best way to learn about RF is through ham radio. Many hams are currently active in QRP (low-power or simple radio) operation, including design and construction. The circuits are small enough that you can breadboard them, and the people who design them often take great care to describe how things work, and how to hack them.
In fact, a formal course with a book written by Prof. David Rutledge of Cal Tech ("The Electronics of Radio") uses a simple ham radio transceiver as the basis for its introduction. The book at the kit are both still available.
Other simpler Kits and projects are available at
http://qrpkits.com/
http://www.njqrp.org/ (try their CD ROM of back issues of HomeBrewer magazine)
http://www.norcalqrp.org/ (which is having an informal meeting this Saturday in Sunnyvale, CA if you're in Silicon Valley)
http://4sqrp.com/
For online peer groups, you might try reading the archives of some of th Yahoo groups; there are about 4500 on amateur radio. Or try these:
http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/qrp-l
http://qrp-l.org/
Getting a ham radio license can be an entre to a group of people who do this kind of thing and are used to helping each other. Now that the morse code requirement is lifted, you may find it easier to get a license. If you've gone through Forrest M Mimms III's books, you probably know about half of what you need already. See here for some roadmap info, or here for practice versions of the real tests, or here for a tutorial approach to the tests.
There was an article on Slashdot the other day mentioning MIT's Open Course Ware. I've known about this for two years, but there is a GREAT class (w/ all videos) called 6.002 Circuits and Electronics, Fall 2000. It has all of video lectures! http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-002Circuits-and-ElectronicsF all2000/CourseHome/index.htm
Yeah, that must have been it.
Unfortunately, Heathkit is long gone as their instruction manuals contained excellent tutorials on circuit construction and operation. Radio Electronics magazine is no more but Circuit Cellar magazine is still going and tends to be more computer and interface oriented anyway. I do not remember the name but there was a European magazine called something like "Electronics" that might have been "EPE" that was also very good. For whatever reason, the Europeans always seemed more hands on then the Americans. If you are inclined toward radio then getting your amateur radio license and subscribing to the ARRL's QST magazine and possibly their much more technical QEX magazine is a sure way to start learning.
Don Lancaster and Bob Pease have authored books on electronics design and construction that have lessons for beginners through degreed engineers. The various Linear Technology application books are also very good with special emphasis on the ones written by Jim Williams.
The one piece of equipment that beginners tend to overlook is the soldering iron. Temperature controlled pencil irons are available for about $100 that are worth every penny. I especially like the old style Weller Magnastat designs which are currently listed as the WTCPT series.
...I'm gone for a day, and look what happens. Thanks for all the responses, everyone. This is exactly what I was hoping for when I first posted- You all are great.
If you're going to play with RF there are lots of excelent books out there. One of the standard ham references is Experimental Methods in RF Design by Rick Campbell, Wes Hayward and Bob Larkin. This is a real get-your-hands-dirty-and-experiment kind of book.
If you look EMRFD up on Amazon (or just about anywhere else, for that matter) you'll find lots of other references worth tracking down.
...laura
I tinkered with electronics & "Radio-Shack" projects back in the late 1970s & early '80s and I still like to go into the local electronics stores to look around (note: NOT Radio Shack anymore).
Yeap, way back when RadShack had some good learning projects, but now they have hardly anything. At least the ones around here as I've looked for them. Heathkit had some good things too but I don't know how well they are now.
FalconShould there be a Law?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is Op Amps, you can build so many fun things with a 741 op amp and a handful of components and learn so much. A lecturer of mine at uni used to go on about them all the time and I bought a book 100 fun projects with the 741 op amp and really I learned so much, I did a quick google on op amp projects and there's a squillion of them. Off the top of my head, and from memory a long time ago, things you can build with op amps are 1. voltage regulator 2. Low and high pass filters 3. oscillators and signal generators 4. bandpass filters 5. comparators more... The maths for an op amp is very easy because of it's unique characteristics - to do with high input impedance and high gain. I'd offer you a reference but it was 15 years ago that I played with these and I can't remember the book, perhaps someone else can help. Have fun
You dont need money to start messing around with electronic stuff. I started at a young age eventually getting a degree, only because I had a goal to set. I've seen people with degrees, that only know and remember book smart. So just because they say they have a degree doesn't mean they are experts, including myself. It just means they were able to pass the test. I started when i was young, about 9 years of age. Putting small 2 cycle gas engines together, and messing with things i shouldn't have. Recently i started a blog to see if there would be any response and also to see what it was like to make one. Before we get there, a quick look back at myself. I made things from scratch because i had to; I didn't have any money to buy parts. I found parts from old radios and things. By the time i reached high school I had an opportunity to take a class in electronics. I tried to convey to the teacher, I wanted to know how to take these parts and build anything i want to. The teacher didn't understand what i was asking, nor did i know how to ask it properly. I built a tube transmitter back then, and several more after that. You know, the pirate kind, so I could play music 10 miles away.What i can tell you is, there are so many catagories to choose from, not one person can do them all. I liked radio transmitters and metal detectors. I made other things but that's what I wanted to figure out how to make. When you start out, Just go to radio shack and pick up a soldering iron for $8.00. Listen I can solder with a gun by controller the trigger movement if i have to,i've done it, and on small pcbs too. Sure does make you gain knowhow of heat control. My preference is the 25 watt soldering iron. You could buy a bigger wattage one and hook it to a light dimmer switch to control the heat, and turn it down to wahtever you want. I never have. Now that you have an iron, you are ready to play. Research and look for a picture on how to solder. The secret is, as soon as you get your soldering iron you need to tin the end. That is to say you need to melt solder on the tip so that it is silver looking, wipe off the excess with a wet paper towel or sponge. Always keep your tip clean. If it starts to build up, fix it again, just before you solder a part. Sometimes you will have to scrape the burnt crud off and shine it up with fine emery cloth or whatever works. Also the tip must be snug tight. At times you will need loosen it, and re-tighten it. Otherwise it will not get a good heat transfer to the tip. Now if you get done soldering, you should remove the tip or at least make sure you loosen it, otherwise when you go to replace the tip, you cant, because the heat damaged the threads, and the tip will not turn and snap off. You need to you rosin core solder only. I prefer the size bigger than the smallest stuff(unless you get good and need to solder an IC chip). My reasoning is the flux inside will help you solder good. When you solder, do not hold the tip directly on a part for any length of time or it could damage the part. Use what is called a heatsink if you can. A heat sink is like an alligator clip you attach to the part to absorb the heat, so the part wont. Best looking solder jobs are when you come in contact with the part first holding the iron at the proper angle then apply just alittle solder to the tip and part at the same time. The iron is removed quickly just after the solder flows. I mean flows. Do not put solder on the tip and try and stick it to the part you are trying to solder. You will be wasting your time, 'cause it is not a good connection, no matter what you say. Do not keep the heat on the part and keep trying to solder. Let the part cool down again before you do it again. If you mess up, you can simply touch it up with a dab of melted solder or you can buy a solder wick from Radio Shack, or de-soldering bulb, (not for me) the wick works for me. All it is ,is a braided copper that you take and lay on the solder, heat it up, the solder melts and is soaked up by the wick. What you need now is