FWIW, it's digital electronics
What other kinds of "electronics" are there?
Learn electronics by practice
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#32It goes without saying that Ben Eater's 8-bit computer kits [1] are like Legos for wannabe-electronics nerds. The kits themselves were the response of the outpouring of requests from viewers of his amazing YouTube channel where he first rose to notoriety for his breadboard CPU and computer. I am currently assembling his 6502 breadboard computer (with the 16 x 2 LCD character display). Someone put together an awesome…
There is also http://www.555-timer-circuits.com/
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#33Please check this book by Ex-Google, Cisco, Sun engineer and adjunct professor of UC Berkeley,Ed Lipiansky on electronics fundamentals (analog and digital): Electrical, Electronics, and Digital Hardware Essentials for Scientists and Engineers: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Electrical,+Electronics,+and+Dig...
Wow, this book's pricey. Is it worth it for a beginner?
btw, Ed wasn't an adjunct at Berkeley. He taught at the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz _extension_ program.
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#34Someone rewrote a bunch of text books from the 1970s and put them on the internet. Unless you work in IC development you don't need to know how comparators work internally. The logic gate examples are slighly less obsolete (early 1980s). This is yet another joke introduction written by a hobbyist who wants to mess with individual transistors for no purpose. There are no practical applications for these examples and there is no learning value in them.
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#35I opened this thinking I was the target audience - a longtime developer who has always wanted to get into electronics. However, this first paragraph... > In order to present our paradigm in learning electronics, we can take an example of a full adder chip that enables binary addition. Let us use a top-down approach, and look at the datasheet of the TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) chip 7483. We will immediately noti…
In my experience in a university ECE program, you'd start with understanding the high level properties of transistors, then combining transistors to make AND and OR gates, then XOR and other gates, then MUXes and half/full adders, then flip-flops and eventually into synchronous (clocked) logic. The lab component of such coursework did start with TTL chips but the timing of the coursework was such that you'd have most…
Was it an Electrical Engineering, Electronics Engineering or Electrical Engineering Technology Program? My digital course skipped over transistor level and spent that time on basic FPGA's instead.
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#36It goes without saying that Ben Eater's 8-bit computer kits [1] are like Legos for wannabe-electronics nerds. The kits themselves were the response of the outpouring of requests from viewers of his amazing YouTube channel where he first rose to notoriety for his breadboard CPU and computer. I am currently assembling his 6502 breadboard computer (with the 16 x 2 LCD character display). Someone put together an awesome…
There's also a great game that walks through a bunch of these concepts and ends up with a working computer starting from gates.
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#37I opened this thinking I was the target audience - a longtime developer who has always wanted to get into electronics. However, this first paragraph... > In order to present our paradigm in learning electronics, we can take an example of a full adder chip that enables binary addition. Let us use a top-down approach, and look at the datasheet of the TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) chip 7483. We will immediately noti…
In my experience all serious electronics/electrical engineering learning material is written like this, as if the student knows everything about electronics except the one topic the author is explaining. Probably an artifact of being written for industry users. You can get used to it though, kind of putting boxes around certain circuits and just looking at behavior without asking how it works until you need to understand then doing a deep dive.
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#38I'm a math dropout, now self-taught software engineer who has been spending the summer filling in gaps in my CS education. Programming language implementation finally started to click for me -- bytecode interpreters and compilers are much less intimidating for me than they were several months ago. And now having implemented my own (toy) interpreters, I'm interested for the first time in understanding some of the nitty gritty details of how hardware components work. So I started working through the nand2tetris projects and tinkering with breadboards, and wow. This stuff is so much fun! I'm bummed I didn't start sooner
I never really imagined I would be interested in this stuff, much less find it kind of beautiful. Pure math brain, if you aren't careful, can train you to view anything applied with disdain, and something as earthy as hardware even moreso. But it's kind of beautiful how there are deep and inevitable connections between some of the most abstract theory computer science has to offer (plt, pl design and implementation) and the way physical objects are harnessed for computation. I guess if you consider that von Neumann was a mathematician first and foremost then it starts to make more sense
Either way, I'm having a great time -- definitely recommend anyone in a similar position learn this stuff whenever you're ready for it
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#39I opened this thinking I was the target audience - a longtime developer who has always wanted to get into electronics. However, this first paragraph... > In order to present our paradigm in learning electronics, we can take an example of a full adder chip that enables binary addition. Let us use a top-down approach, and look at the datasheet of the TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) chip 7483. We will immediately noti…
It might have to do with how longtime "longtime developer" means.
I took a look at TFA because of this. My experience caps out at doing a few heathkits in the early 80s and one single soldering of a resistor on my Synology to repair an issue a few years ago. I *mostly* understood the diagram, most of which was due to seeing it during CS adjacent classes in the early 90s.
Unfortunately it's often the case that these ELI5 type articles assume baseline knowledge that's less than baseline.
Re: Learn electronics by practice
#40Personally, this guy[0] eased me back into electronics, very clear explanations and beginner friendly.