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Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

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Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#61

Post by donthellbanme »

auxym wrote: post #51
donthellbanme wrote: post #38

This is advice for hobbyists. Guys who want to tinker, wire their home, and fix their car, and maybe fix that broken radio. I have found most people are rusty when it comes to Electronics, and electricity. The Art of Electronics, and it's lab, is very long. I was shocked when I heard Harvard Students completed it in 1 semester. It's recommended here a lot though. There's nothing wrong with it other than being written…

The problem with 3-way switches is that there's (at least) 8 ways they can be wired: https://www.easy-do-it-yourself-home-improvements.com/3-way-... And more generally, the difficult part about building electricity is code. Codebooks are absolutely huge, difficult to read, and can vary by locality (not just by country or state but actually at the municipal level). I just don't have it in me to try and memorize a huge…

They are a pain. The NEC is a huge mess. To those doing residential wiring, pull those wires at least 6" from the receptacles. Fasten within 6". Record abusive Building Inspectors.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#62

Post by deepspace »

auxym wrote: post #51
donthellbanme wrote: post #38

This is advice for hobbyists. Guys who want to tinker, wire their home, and fix their car, and maybe fix that broken radio. I have found most people are rusty when it comes to Electronics, and electricity. The Art of Electronics, and it's lab, is very long. I was shocked when I heard Harvard Students completed it in 1 semester. It's recommended here a lot though. There's nothing wrong with it other than being written…

The problem with 3-way switches is that there's (at least) 8 ways they can be wired: https://www.easy-do-it-yourself-home-improvements.com/3-way-... And more generally, the difficult part about building electricity is code. Codebooks are absolutely huge, difficult to read, and can vary by locality (not just by country or state but actually at the municipal level). I just don't have it in me to try and memorize a huge…

The way 3-way switch wiring is presented in codebooks and electricians' manuals is 'weird' in a way that makes it very hard (for me) to understand. I am a qualified electronics engineer and I would much rather analyze some obscure analog circuit than try to understand someone's 3-way switch diagram.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#63

Post by whartung »

blippage wrote: post #25

I find the problem with a lot of electronics books is that they are either too deep, or too shallow. Gerry Sussman (yes, that Sussman) explained that the way electronics is taught, and the way engineers think about problems are two separate things. So teaching material tends to fall into two camps: 1) detailed explanations that cover great depth, but are difficult to know how to apply to practical circuits, or 2) cir…

Something I've always disliked about electronics instruction, is discussion of actual applications.

Consider the esteemed Art of Electronics. By chapter, it covers Fundamentals, Transistors, Op Amps, Filters, and Oscillators.

That's all well and good. Except, in my case, while these are all interesting in isolation, I don't know what I am supposed to do with these components. How do I turn these components in to, say, a radio, or a garage door opener, or whatever else folks do with electronics?

No doubt it probably doesn't help to approach it without an application. That said, when learning programming, we had all of these contrived exercises to illustrate a programming concept. I remember an early Fortran exercise was computing the date for Easter in any particular year. Did I have a particular need to know where Easter fell? No, but it was nice to see math, and expressions, and variable, and input/output in operation vs just being presented with operators and precedence rules. We had to apply it to a "real world" task.

I took an electronics class in High School. And, frankly, we didn't build anything. We wired components together and took measurements. I learned Ohms Law, the resistor color code, etc. I did build, I think, an AM transmitter kit. Discrete components, PC board, soldered it all up. But I had no idea how it worked. Just an array random components soldered together.

Honestly, I think the success of modern hobby digital electronics, centered around mostly interfacing Things to a microcontroller, has such good velocity due to how little actual "electronics" knowledge you need to get your LED blinking or servo moving. It's mostly wiring up black boxes.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#65

Post by buescher »

tinco wrote: post #30
blippage wrote: post #25

I find the problem with a lot of electronics books is that they are either too deep, or too shallow. Gerry Sussman (yes, that Sussman) explained that the way electronics is taught, and the way engineers think about problems are two separate things. So teaching material tends to fall into two camps: 1) detailed explanations that cover great depth, but are difficult to know how to apply to practical circuits, or 2) cir…

At university one of the mandatory courses was Computer Organisation, which teaches how computers are built electronically. Two weeks of that course covered DRAM timings. Recently (almost 15 years later) I was trying to design a simple automation system for my home's ventilation system, and for it I needed to pull my logic signal up to 10v using a FET. I had absolutely no idea how to do that. It's absolutely crazy th…

Just wait till you put a bigger load on your fet than that 100K resistor, try to PWM it, and discover the Miller effect.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#66

Post by buescher »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #55
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really two separate things because of the way they're taught. They're separate things because they're actually separate. A fully qualified EE understands circuits at a deep mathematical level. Analog circuit design is basically a variant of the same theory used to model masses/springs and various other equivalent systems. (Of which there are many.) It's based on diff eqs with various simplifications (spec…

When I was young I loved magazines like Popular Electronics. After getting my EE, I looked back at those magazines in my collection I immediately thought "That's so wrong!" or "That omits so/too much" or "I can't believe I thought this was electronics" or "Baby project! How lame!". :-) So it's very much about what can be absorbed and tailoring to the audience. You can't start with the math load that an EE student get…

One of my mentors said "read all the hobby magazines, you never know what you might learn, sometimes they pick up new technology faster than industry". So did Bob Pease in one of his columns. But yeah, there's a lot of groaners in them.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#67

Post by ffhhj »

whartung wrote: post #63
blippage wrote: post #25

I find the problem with a lot of electronics books is that they are either too deep, or too shallow. Gerry Sussman (yes, that Sussman) explained that the way electronics is taught, and the way engineers think about problems are two separate things. So teaching material tends to fall into two camps: 1) detailed explanations that cover great depth, but are difficult to know how to apply to practical circuits, or 2) cir…

Something I've always disliked about electronics instruction, is discussion of actual applications. Consider the esteemed Art of Electronics. By chapter, it covers Fundamentals, Transistors, Op Amps, Filters, and Oscillators. That's all well and good. Except, in my case, while these are all interesting in isolation, I don't know what I am supposed to do with these components. How do I turn these components in to, say…

> How do I turn these components in to, say, a radio

The problem is that you have so many models of the same components, that can be connected together in so many configurations, to obtain so many results, that even if the book had a recipe to build a radio, it won't tell you a lot of how to build the radio for your given application (freq. range? power? bands? noise correction? etc.). It would probably be better to explain different components and how to use tools to probe them and tell whether they are behaving with the right voltage, current, resistance, frequency, timing, logic, etc.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#68

Post by buescher »

whartung wrote: post #63
blippage wrote: post #25

I find the problem with a lot of electronics books is that they are either too deep, or too shallow. Gerry Sussman (yes, that Sussman) explained that the way electronics is taught, and the way engineers think about problems are two separate things. So teaching material tends to fall into two camps: 1) detailed explanations that cover great depth, but are difficult to know how to apply to practical circuits, or 2) cir…

Something I've always disliked about electronics instruction, is discussion of actual applications. Consider the esteemed Art of Electronics. By chapter, it covers Fundamentals, Transistors, Op Amps, Filters, and Oscillators. That's all well and good. Except, in my case, while these are all interesting in isolation, I don't know what I am supposed to do with these components. How do I turn these components in to, say…

Radio is the traditional hobby application and is a good place to start. The ARRL publications vary in quality and level but are generally pretty good. You can go as deep as you want into RF design at the hobby level as a ham. It's sort of a new golden age with good-enough test equipment so cheap these days and the sheer range of parts available on the internet.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#69

Post by dale_glass »

tinco wrote: post #30
blippage wrote: post #25

I find the problem with a lot of electronics books is that they are either too deep, or too shallow. Gerry Sussman (yes, that Sussman) explained that the way electronics is taught, and the way engineers think about problems are two separate things. So teaching material tends to fall into two camps: 1) detailed explanations that cover great depth, but are difficult to know how to apply to practical circuits, or 2) cir…

At university one of the mandatory courses was Computer Organisation, which teaches how computers are built electronically. Two weeks of that course covered DRAM timings. Recently (almost 15 years later) I was trying to design a simple automation system for my home's ventilation system, and for it I needed to pull my logic signal up to 10v using a FET. I had absolutely no idea how to do that. It's absolutely crazy th…

That's an absolutely trivial "how do you use a transistor" sort of example, though. If that's not covered I'd say it's because you're not learning electronics at all. You're just learning how a CPU talks to the RAM at a logical level, and what exactly you're actually doing when you're fiddling with the CAS latency setting in the BIOS.

Re: Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)

#70

Post by buescher »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #45
blippage wrote: post #25

I find the problem with a lot of electronics books is that they are either too deep, or too shallow. Gerry Sussman (yes, that Sussman) explained that the way electronics is taught, and the way engineers think about problems are two separate things. So teaching material tends to fall into two camps: 1) detailed explanations that cover great depth, but are difficult to know how to apply to practical circuits, or 2) cir…

They're not really two separate things because of the way they're taught. They're separate things because they're actually separate. A fully qualified EE understands circuits at a deep mathematical level. Analog circuit design is basically a variant of the same theory used to model masses/springs and various other equivalent systems. (Of which there are many.) It's based on diff eqs with various simplifications (spec…

Chop wood, carry water. Using cookbook circuits is kind of like that zen story. You come full circle.

There's little enough honestly new in electronics that almost anything you do will look cookbook to an outsider. Designing actual products is exacting and deep, though. An example to look at is the writeup nwavguy did on his O2 headphone amp. He makes it look easy. The core amp is not an app note design or reference design but if he'd chosen the equivalent parts from TI it just about could have been. It's very straightforward. There is nothing exotic in it. The parts are cheap. The layout is even pretty mundane for high end audio. And yet it measures to be just about flawless, it has a nice no-pop turn-on circuit, etc. and there are plenty of headphone amps you can buy that do not. Without specific experience and expertise in audio design most fully qualified EEs would pathetically struggle to make something that nice.

It's one of the best electronic designs for hobbyists I've ever seen. All of you should build one if you think you might want something like that.

The only flaw I've found in mine is that the hysteresis on the low battery cutoff is not sufficient for some batteries (as they age and the internal resistance goes up) and it can "motorboat" before the battery cuts out. A really good low battery cutoff circuit is also surprisingly challenging.

“The novice says to the master, ‘What does one do before enlightenment?’ ‘Chop wood. Carry water,’ replies the master. The novice asks, ‘What, then, does one do after enlightenment?’ ‘Chop wood. Carry water.'”

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