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Where To Start In DIY Electronics?
pyrosine writes "I've been thinking about this for a while and have no idea where to start. I have little or no previous experience in electronics — just what is covered in GCSE physics (wiring a plug and resistors — not much, I know). The majority of my interest lies in the wireless communication side of the field — i.e. ham radios and CB — but I am also interested in how many things work, one example being speakers, simply to better understand it. I would preferably like to start with some form of practical guide rather than learning the theory first, but where I would find such a walkthrough eludes me."
Once you have the basics down you will probably want to get into microcontrollers. There are a lot of ways to go here depending on how much time you want to spend wiring things up yourself, and your comfort level with software. You might start with the very popular PIC. Although the architecture is a bit long in the tooth and is a poor target for C, there loads of example projects for it so it's easy to learn. There are also many high-level building blocks (Basic stamp etc) that can get you up and running quickly. If you have sophisticated software needs, you'll want a more modern micro with better tools - check out Atmel or TI.
Eventually you will need a more formal treatment if you want to design your own circuits. I consider The Art of Electronics to be the bible here - it is thorough but also very practical and you will find it has specific solutions for many everyday engineering problems. It has been a great investment, and one of the better worn books on my shelf. Have fun!
The majority of my interest lies in the wireless communication side of the field -- i.e. ham radios and CB
Join your local amateur radio club. Get your licence.
73s de MM0YEQ
I should also point out Tangent's tutorials, which are fantastic introductions into wiring and soldering even if you're not interested in audio work.
Thumbs up from this electrical engineer. Here's a portion of the Amazon description:
It may be the only "introduction to electronics books" with back cover comments by Dave Barry, Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, and George Garrett, as well as recomendations from Robert Hazen, Bob Mostafapour, Dr. Roger Young, Dr. Wayne Green, Scott Rundle, Brian Battles, Michelle Guido, Herb Reichert and Emil Venere. As Monitoring Times said, "Perhaps the best electronics book ever. If you'd like to learn about basic electronics but haven't been able to pull it off, get There Are No Electrons. Just trust us. Get the book."
Learn not to grab hot soldering iron by the barrel or tip.
Handle is much safer.
Metalesson 1: it doesn't matter if you think you need to keep your eyes on that twitchy almost-mechanically-sound connection in order to keep it from springing apart before you can solder it. You still need to pick your head up and guide your hands to the soldering iron, because grasping blindly WILL HURT.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Since you seem to be in the UK, Maplin is the place to go for hobbyist electronic stuff.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search.aspx?criteria=Electronic%20Kit&source=15
Short list:
1) Horowitz and Hill "Art of Electronics" 2nd ed -- human readable mix of theory and practical application -- must have
2) ARRL Handbook -- any year in the past decade -- great introduction to RF communications, good mix of theory and practice -- must have for ham radio
3) Wes Hayward "Experimental Methods in RF design" -- must have for homebrew ham radio enthusiast who wants practical advice but also wants to learn the theory
Formerly sold at Radius Shack as an OEM product. I learned on Radio Shack's earlier version the 100-1 Electronic Project Kit when I was 10.
Elenco 200-in-1 Electronic Project Lab, you can find it on amazon.
I come from a programming background, and I wanted to get into electronics. So I bought an Arduino, a breadboard, and some LEDs. Write some C code, compile it and throw it on there, and blinkenlights galore.
But wait! It can also read analog values. Hook up a potentiometer and a LED, and dim it based on the pot's position. Or grab a 7-segment display and map the pot to the display's 0-9.
All of these use the microcontroller, and since I already knew how to program I knew how to make that part of the circuit do what I wanted. I had to learn how to safely connect the micro and the other components together - but I wasn't starting from nothing.
I'm working through RC circuits now, which requires a strong working knowledge of resistors and capacitors and how they interact with the system. Wikipedia is your friend
Basically, take what you already know and use it as a wedge to push your way into something new. For me, the wedge was programming.
A word of caution - You should know enough about electricity to avoid killing yourself before you even start. Internalize the difference between voltage and amperage, for one. But if all you're working with is the small side of a 9v transformer, you should be OK.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
It's a nice reference. Once in a while you just have to get right back to the basics and remind yourself how some common BJT circuits such as current mirrors work. Ditto with basic opamp circuits.
Depending what's understood with "electronics" it's big and sprawling subject with many sub-disciplines. You can get into EMI quagmire and never really come out of it, for example.
I was interviewed with one company where "cad heads" and designers are quite separate with layout designers being the less appreciated job.
In any case, there are many, many things to learn and you only become really good when years go by and you accumulate knowledge. You do, however, probably become good only in subset of things you've worked with.
For example. Mosfets are voltage controlled devices and you do not have to worry about power to the gate, right? Wrong. The gate charge, while very small _does_ add up hugely in SMPS circuits and such when you're charging and discharging that small capacitor 100000 times a second or so.
This is crap!
You will always need the analog side of electronics, even in digital systems.
As a limited example list: decoupling caps, local bus stiffeners, weak/strong pull-up and pull-down, termination, current limiting, pulse shaping, pulse doubling, one-shot generator.
Just try to implement a power supply, let alone design one, without an analog electronics understanding of how things are working and how they will work.
You really do need a good understanding of analog electronics, even in an "all-digital" world.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
They can't stop you. They can only intimidate you.
Start here : http://www.ladyada.net/library/equipt/kits.html
Probably the lowest cost, best-value combination of tools and supplies.
Start with this book : http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9780596153748
Don't be afraid to blow stuff up. Hell, in all the best books/articles I've read about the very first thing the authors have you do is blow up an LED. Get used to it.
Go work in a Chinese factory making ipods for $5/hr. you will learn all about electronics there.
I concur on The Art of Electronics. It contains most of the information I received in two+ years of Electrical Engineering classes. It starts out slow with the basics, this is a resistor, this is a capacitor, this is an inductor and the like. Scanning through my (now 21 year old) second edition, about the only area it doesn't cover that I got in school is power, but then power is not electronics.
If you are not interested in getting an engineering degree to do some DIY electronics, I'd suggest two places to start: 1. Make: magazine. Regular articles on electronic control circuits with some good information on how they work. (and many other great things I might add) 2. The Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits, Rudolf F. Graf. (now called Volume 1, since they put out 6 more over the years) It has almost 100 simple to complex circuits with descriptions of what they do, but not much about how. To get the how, get The Art of Electronics and plan on reading a lot of the first 100 pages and then using it for a reference each time you try to decipher what some circuit is doing.
Try: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ This has some good lessons describing the prinicples behind circuitry, and suggests some experiments to try. Best of all, it's free!
The Art of Electronics is the best book ever for learning all these basics.
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521370957/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271114053&sr=8-1
(not an affiliate link)
Yeah, it's $90, but its worth it. Broke? I'm sure the library has it, and that's free!
After that I'd really recommend learning microcontrollers, and for that, Sparkfun Electronics is great.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php
My only other advice is to learn stuff the same way I've been learning stuff the last few years - just look on google. You'll find what you're looking for.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=learning+electronics&aq=f&aqi=g-sx10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Something from the 70's - 80's. shouldn't be more than a couple bucks a piece at garage sales. Old enough to be discrete components, as opposed to a radio-on-chip sort of deal. Get an ARRL handbook from the 70's. Get a soldering iron.
If you still can't get your head around something, try asking for help at dutchforce electronics forums
You have to stick to it, and sooner or later it all makes sense. :-)
If you have a local amateur radio club, they might be helpful. (they might just be a bunch of grumpy old men too, it depends on the chapter...)
Sent from my PDP-11
I'd strongly suggest that you do at least a basic level of looking into theory while you're creating "practical circuits" - it's quite helpful when you're debugging to know at least roughly what's meant to happen.
One source I can recommend is the MIT Open Courseware resources - the 6.002 course on Circuits and Electronics is a good place to start; I'm an embedded software engineer who's started to push into the hardware side of things, and that set of lectures helped me turn my vague understanding of electronics (being able to read a circuit and understand what's going on) into something practical (being able to design a circuit).
I have had plenty of times shocking myself when playing with what I thought were safe devices. Here are a couple that caught me off guard:
1: Capacitors. Even though you are unplugged and powered off, a capacitor can be holding a surprise for you. The one that I learned on was built into a camera flash: So even though the device was powered by a couple of AA batteries (removed), sitting in wait was a capacitor with several thousand volts. I recall getting up off the floor wondering WTF just happened.
2: Relays. These devices use an electromagnet to move a metal reed, which closes (or opens) the connection for another circuit. Be aware that when a magnetic field collapses, electricty is 'made'. So even though I was driving the electromagnet with 9v, the shock I got when the field collapsed was likely several hundred volts. This wouldn't have been quite the problem, if I weren't using the relay to drive the relay (the switched circuit was closed in the unpowered position, and open when powered) - which creates an oscillator. This means that I shocked myself quite a few times before I could get the breadboard off of my hand.
..oh, wait...
Get yourself an Allied Radio kit... oh wait...
Get your self a copy of Popular Electronics... oh wait...
Get yourself a copy of Electronic Hobbyist... oh wait...
Forget it, just go buy a new chinese made mp3 player!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
They have a book on basic (analog) electronics, a digital electronics book that covers digital, and a communications book that include RF and amplifier design (classes A-D). The basic one is really good. It takes you through a NP junction, complete with holes and depletion zones, explaining diodes, then transistors, NPN and PNP and goes over other basic circuit components. As someone who was not new to computers or general electronics, I found these three books from RadioShack of all places to be exactly what I needed to get down to business. I would highly recommend them.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I think a lot of the posters here are making some assumptions. Mims, sure, Horowitz & Hill, another good choice.
You need to find a way to just start playing. Once you've played some, you'll need to figure out how to continue in some direction. A breadboard is relatively inexpensive -- it's usually white with a buttload of holes in it. Wikipedia can help you find it. You'll need a power supply -- something that will provide 3, 5, 9 or 12V seems most useful and common. It can be a box that'll hold a couple of AAs or a 9V, or a computer power supply (AT is nice -- ATX means you have to wire two contacts together on the plug). And, of course, wire. And, if there's wire, there's also needle nose pliers -- the Leatherman is a mainstay of those of us who remind you that you can't spell "geek" without "Double E".
Start by making blinking lights. Get a 555 timer and teach yourself how to make it flash at 1 or 10 Hz. Then get a speaker and make it go at 1KHz or 5KHz. You might have little luck with the transition between visual and audible frequencies -- little speakers below 100Hz are ugly, and you will have trouble viewing flashing on a stationary light above 20Hz. If you get a big enough speaker, and have it going at 1Hz with sufficient voltage swings, you can physically see the membrane moving. Adding a little salt or sand to it can make it easier to see that it is moving indirectly at higher frequencies.
The key is to find a way to get your foot in the door. Concentrate on circuits with a chip or two and a very small handful of discrete components -- a half dozen to start with. Don't start complicated, you'll just get discouraged. Once you've enjoyed that, you can start to think about more complex things like RF transmitters / receivers or BASIC stamp type controllers. If you can pick up a cheap oscilloscope and/or frequency generator, both are good tools to have.
And in this stage of learning, precious little should be soldered. You're prototyping exclusively. This stuff shouldn't be put together for more than a few days of playing. Okay, if you go the laser tag route, there's some merit to soldering that instead of worrying about a wire coming out in the middle of a match. Although if you know what you're doing, you can use a dozen or so parts to make a receiver and a gun can be half that (essentially a switch with a 555 timer at 40KHz is good enough for indoor play away from fluorescent lights whose plasma is / was near that frequency).
After my kids are a little older, I'm going to move onto a stamp type controller and some servos. There's a world of fun just waiting for us there.
Really... not kidding... become a dumpster diver for electronics. Pull junk electronics out of the dumpster and open the cases. Learn to identify the parts. De-solder them from the internal circuit boards. Start a collection of parts. Throw what you don't keep (the real garbage) back into the dumpster. Avoid old televisions. They can hold a charge on their picture tube and that tube can implode if dropped. But old televisions are not supposed to be in dumpsters anymore anyway. (Take them to the GoodWill).
If you can't ID the parts, take a small picture of them with a digital camera and post the image to an AVR or PIC microcontroller or electronics web site, asking 'what is this?'.
The web is fantastic for learning electronics! Thirty years ago an unknown part could stay a mystery for a long time. IC data books could be difficult to obtain. Now just type the letter/number combination printed on the part into Google and you often can find exactly what it is and what it does in seconds. Ask a question on the web and knowledgeable people answer it at your comprehension level.
If you are interested in music, buy a few cheap guitar stompboxes on eBay and take them apart. Many hundreds of schematics are available on the web for stompboxes. And the best part is...if you mess up the circuitry hopelessly, someone will still buy it again on eBay for almost the price that you paid for it. Plus your guitar playing gets better.