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Learn electronics by practice

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Re: Learn electronics by practice

#61

Post by hospitalJail »

linker3000 wrote: post #51
hospitalJail wrote: post #23

If I learned this way, it would have been off-putting. So much nicer to grab an ardunio, motor, led, some sensors, etc... Then graduate to esp8266/esp32. But maybe I'm thinking embedded and my 2 years as an electrical engineer filled in some of the gaps when calculating things. Eh, just my opinion.

If that's the route you want to take then that's absolutely fine. That area of electronics is "modular digital electronics" and doesn't take you through the principles of basic passive components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) and then into analogue circuit theory and semiconductors, digital logic and so on. The only thing that bugs me is when that approach is suggested as a response to 'how do I learn electronic…

Idk, I needed to understand resistors just to power an LED. As soon as you have any raw signal, you basically need a cap to smooth the signal.

I havent had a reason to use my own inductor myself, but obviously plenty of components have them.

Def has digital logic, registers are a clear example of this, especially if you are going to use an esp8266 which has only a few GPIO. There have also been cases when I needed to buy and/or/not gates, but they come as ICs with the caps inside for you.

I feel like making your own logic gates is reinventing the wheel(as the link that we are commenting on suggests). Even in school, doing EE, we only spent a blip on Assembly. I spent way more time doing higher level C/C++ stuff.

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#62

Post by dnlbele »

kaishiro wrote: post #24

I 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…

Dear kaishiro, thank you very much for the observation. Really makes sense! I changed it a little bit to be less 'discouraging', because you really are a target audience. It is my "poor writing", as noted, that sometimes takes over :) Please let me know if this makes more sense.

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#63

Post by dnlbele »

dpwm wrote: post #50
kaishiro wrote: post #24

I 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…

If you look up a data sheet for any 7483 variant, it is immediately notable: the first lines are something like "4-bit binary full adder" and the description says "…accept two 4-bit binary words" If you skip to the next paragraph, you’ll see they are onto transistors. Ideally the author could show a data sheet, but there may be reasons they can’t. I found the material that followed to be a clear exposition of the fun…

Thank you sir! I am grateful for your positive outlook and support

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#64

Post by Cogito »

yard2010 wrote: post #54
vector_spaces wrote: post #38

I'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 nitt…

Nand2tetris[0] is hands down the best course I took in my CS BSc, Nissan and Shocken did such a wonderful job making this great content accessible. It was a fun and rewarding experience in which I built a toy computer bottom-up from scratch. [0] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

And for an online interactive take on the same material, try NandGame[0]!

I've gone through both and they're both excellent. Nand2tetris requires a bit more set up, but goes deeper into things like language development.

For people who have previously looked at NandGame, there has been quite a bit of extra content added over the last year, well worth taking another look.

[0] https://nandgame.com/

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#65

Post by [deleted] »

pfyra wrote: post #49
WalterBright wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is mostly poor writing on the part of the author Indeed. The correct way is: "It is trivially obvious to the most casual observer that the chip performs the addition of two 4-bit binary words"

There should be a "clearly" in there as well as that word by itself is commonly believed to bring a lot of clarity.

[deleted]

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#66

Post by cushychicken »

To the folks I've seen in this thread despairing about how this seems really, really hard at first brush: it is. This is not really a page of intro level electronics concepts. Doesn't mention a whole lot about voltage, current, time vs frequency response, or how to get a grasp on any of those concepts.

If you want a gentler intro that walks you through some of the foundational concepts, Analog Devices has some great free courses on Circuit Theory:

https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/circuits#circuits...

And another great one on electronics:

https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/...

They are the best in the business at analog circuit design and A/D conversion. Worthy of your attention if you're serious about learning this stuff.

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#67

Post by denton-scratch »

dgacmu wrote: post #29
kaishiro wrote: post #24

I 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…

I think this is mostly poor writing on the part of the author. You being able to "immediately notice" is contingent upon having read the data sheet, which was not linked nor reproduced, but the way it was presented made it seem like the diagram was sufficient. If you were to have read the data sheet, it would have stated up front that the circuit performs four-bit addition. But the page did not facilitate that...

> But the page did not facilitate that...

I had to do a lot of navigation to get to the first page of content; which dropped me straight into a 4-bit full adder. To my mind, that's logic circuits, not electronics.

To be fair, most intro-to-electronics pages start with Ohms Law and so on, which to my mind isn't electronics at all - it's basic electricity. This site starts with diodes, which is indeed the entry-point to electronics proper. But jumping in with gates is arse-over-tit; gates are a special case of amplifiers, and I think explaining transistors as amplifiers should precede explaning them as switches.

Regarding navigation: The whole thing is set in something like Courier, and links don't look any different from body text, even when you hover. And I generally expect no more than one click from the homepage to get me to page 1 of the content. A contents page that links to contents-of-the-contents pages seems like a rabbit-warren.

Re: Learn electronics by practice

#69

Post by bvan »

yard2010 wrote: post #54
vector_spaces wrote: post #38

I'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 nitt…

Nand2tetris[0] is hands down the best course I took in my CS BSc, Nissan and Shocken did such a wonderful job making this great content accessible. It was a fun and rewarding experience in which I built a toy computer bottom-up from scratch. [0] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

Thanks for the link, just what I was looking for the other day. Was listening to a Steve Wozniak interview and his early tinkering with pong and the like.
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