Making the leap...

papoanaya

Hello:

I'm a computer engineer that spent too much of his time doing programmer's work. I purchased a boe bot for Xmas, to remember all what I learned back in school in my electronics/circuit class. Working with the boe bot is a lot's of fun, which has forced me to take out the pen/paper and revisit the concepts I learned in school (I was happy when I managed to prove the equation for a voltage divider, those little things in the world that makes us happy .

However, the part that has been particularly frustrating is that I've not been able to make "the leap" from purely theoretical equations in electronics theory into applying those to create or repair electronic circuits. I have always felt that it is not the same to analyze the voltage of each node of a transistor and make the jump of taking a couple of those and creating a morse code transceiver (for example).

So, how you old hats managed to do the leap and what pointers could you provide me so I can go from to on practical electronics circuits?





Papo

SteveW

>So, how you old hats managed to do the leap

Partly by being an old hat [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Books I like, that tend towards the practical, include

The Art of Electronics - ISBN: 0521370957
(The microprocessor side of this book is getting a bit quaint, but the vast majority of it is excellent, and you can get plenty of microprocessor info from Parallax...)

Err, everything else is secondary to this, or so hardcore that it's not really suitable for beginners.

Other than that, pick small, finishable projects, and finish them. Repeat, with more tricky projects, until old [noparse]:)[/noparse]

Steve

Paul Baker

To quote Robert Frost, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

From a hardware engineer's perspective, that choice means hardship, agrivation and the occasional ulcer. Whenever you can, it's best to find circuits, or building blocks already created by other people and adapt them to your own use. Your educational background comes in when such a circuit or combination of circuits does not perform as expected and you analyze it to figure out why. Do as Newton did, and stand on the shoulders of giants, you'll see much further.

You can aquire such circuits by traditional or non-traditional media, I have on many ocassions searched night after night looking for different variations of a circuit to perform a desired task, and have always stumbled across somthing which did exactly what I wanted or close enough that I could adapt it.

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·1+1=10

Post Edited (Paul Baker) : 2/6/2006 4:48:46 PM GMT

David B

When I was learning electronics (at home via a correspondence course) the thing that impressed me the most was when I would calculate that a couple of watts would be dissapated in a little quarter watt resistor, and I'd run the circuit, and burn my finger on the resistor - that made me smart! (hehe)

It didn't take too many of those experiences to make a believer out of me - the equations work, and they're real - when you calculate so many milliamps, or watts, or whatever, it really means that real things are happenning in those little wires.

I'd say get a breadboard and a handful of parts and make something like an amplified AM crystal radio; something fairly simple, but one that is doing a real piece of work. Then start making small changes, like change the gain of a transistor or something, where you'll be able to hear the diference.

And as you make the changes, write down gain equations as best you can to see if you can match what the math says to what you actually see and hear happenning.

David

Kevin Wood

You might also want to look at some texts that approach electronics from more of an engineering technicain perspective. Usually the math and theory isn't as in-depth, and there is more emphasis on "hands-on" circuit design and construction.