6 ms·

I used be an ameteur electronics enthusiast. When I was young, I used to assemble trivial circuits (dancing lights etc.): I could go to an electronics shop. The

I used be an ameteur electronics enthusiast. When I was young, I used to assemble trivial circuits (dancing lights etc.): I could go to an electronics shop. They used to sell hobby kits for simple, accessible, devices. The kit had circuit layout, component list, labels, what goes where and all. I then assembled them per the layout ("this leg of the transistor goes to the left leg of the capacitor"). It worked - I used to be quite pleased with myself, and used to show that off to other people. No mentors; no one to consult on my doubts. I was "self-made". But the thing is that I never had a clear idea of how it worked; or, if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB). That condition is what I now realize as being unable to reason about the circuit at hand. As in, how would I arrive at that circuit by myself - being able to point at components and say, "this guy does this, and the other guy does this, and voila, we've dancing light". I can name individual components and stuff, and can wave my hands and say what it does individually. The fact that I can't compose a circuit from scratch still gets me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how one can build an intuitive understanding and a mental model? EDIT: it just occurred to me "dancing lights" are called Astable Multivibrator! We were taught this at school, after I built them. Oh, I still can remember how smug I felt!

ploxiln 3y ago
I think you just have to start: have an idea for something slightly different than any of your kits do, assemble it on a breadboard, go through the pain of troubleshooting it (and maybe working-around issues you can't quite solve directly). After that, blog posts and youtube videos about other people's little projects will be of more value, you'll be able to really think about the circuit they designed in a different way, it'll have some concrete ideas in your brain to make connections to. (This is how I think about software too fwiw. Start trying to write something on your own, then study the technical detail after, the technical detail will have something to relate to instead of just floating abstractly away. Then try to apply it yourself again, you'll probably be excited to use it at that point.)
jakewins 3y ago
I have (had? getting better!) this same issue, and it really killed excitement of electronics for me for a long time. I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do <x> for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848 I do think there'd be a lot of value in blog or youtube series of experienced circuit designers showing how they approach things, why and how they pick components etc, it's a great way to learn. The blog post that HN thread is about is really good as an example. I've had several people recommend "The Art of Electronics" as a reference for circuits building as well, but haven't read it yet
- wholinator2 3y ago
  Highly relieved to see this as I've just bought a copy of the art of electronics (2nd edition, 3rd is too expensive for me) and plan to build some things at the university lab this summer
- penguin_booze 3y ago
  Are there any YT series that are worthy of mention? I think I've a PDF copy of The Art of Electronics. One day...
  - szundi 3y ago
    Eevblog
    - mindcrime 3y ago
      EEVBlog is great, but... anybody just discovering the channel should be aware, Dave puts out content that fits into a number of different categories: educational, entertainment, edutainment, test equipment reviews / teardowns, mailbag, repairs, debunking, meta commentary about Youtube, career stuff, and "other". And purely educational stuff isn't a huge part of what he puts out these days. That said, he has put out some really good stuff, especially back when he was doing "Fundamentals Friday" as a routine thing. Just don't expect a steady stream of purely educational, "electronics fundamentals" stuff.
georgeoliver 3y ago
Give the book Practical Electronics for Inventors a try.
- penguin_booze 3y ago
  Will do. I had picked up that from a link from one of the earlier comments.
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    This book will get you farther faster than The Art of Electronics.
StingyJelly 3y ago
It's a bit like scripting in python vs C on limiting hardware. Even some people with fresh EE degree struggle with this. Modern design often heavily focuses on simulation and reusing the company's IP blocks. Companies try to push for this approach despite the inefficiencies exactly because they can then hire those fresh "unripe" engineers. Old-school engineers almost always come up with better ad-hoc circuit designs trough. If you live near a university, you can probably sit in on lectures (analog-design, analog circuits, microelectronics). There are also many videos on YouTube. (If you're not really interested in repairs, skip those as that is slightly different skillset.) One really good channel is Sam Ben Yaakov's https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov Developing a mental model of circuits also takes practice. The practice can mean simulation or playing with an oscilloscope and components on a breadboard but you need the feedback loop: designing/tweaking the circuit, checking if the behavior matches your expectation, finding what you missed if there's something wrong. Start with simple circuits and gradually work your way up to more complex ones.
- penguin_booze 3y ago
  I'm in two minds whether I should probably give electronics another go, and with that, investing in devices like a power supply and oscilloscope. Also, I had watched some videos from Behzad Razavi.
  - ted_dunning 3y ago
    Before you invest in hardware, grab a free simulator and start without hardware. My favorite is LinSpice because it runs well for free on a mac, but the UI is very quirky. There are web sims available as well. This will let you get started immediately and will let you see what's happening visually.
  - StingyJelly 3y ago
    You're on a good track, didn't come to mind but prof. Razavi's lectures are great! As the other person mentioned, you can do a lot in simulation. KiCad now has a builtin ngspice support (trough it's still a bit rough.) On windows, ltspice is another quite popular free option.
jacquesm 3y ago
The way to overcome that is to start off with broken gear and to repair it. You'll be forced bit by bit to understand how the circuits work. It helps if there is a schematic and if there isn't then you'll have to trace the circuit yourself which will help even more in building up a mental model. Of course this all presumes that there is a circuit worth examining to begin with, more often than not these days you'd be looking at a bunch of custom made chips and a few external components too large to fit into the chip which itself contains a microprocessor and a bunch of software to do the heavy lifting. But pick up an 80's tape recorder or amplifier that's busted and you're going to have fun learning. Start on the simplest stuff you can find and work your way up from there.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  Very worthwhile advice here. This bench really looks focused on hobby prototyping, nicely done with that in mind, and with the proper assortment of components in multiples so you can go from idea to funtional circuit directly without encountering the show-stoppers (or delayers) that can be so common otherwise. A repair bench can be made to avoid a somewhat different set of show-stoppers, there will not only be a number of different things more useful at your fingertips, but a deep store of off-bench material and tools still accessible allowing much more powerful operation. Also taking up much more auxiliary space than any one optimized bench. Either way you never avoid all the unforseen show-stoppers, so you need a clear location to shelve & preserve an incomplete prototype or repair/restoration project, for instance while waiting for parts, in order to fully clear the bench for other work which can then be quickly accomplished from start-to-finish. And then there's the "production" bench for hobbyists where prototyping and repair is not so much of a consideration. Collect 'em all.
Animats 3y ago
> Does anyone have any suggestions as to how one can build an intuitive understanding and a mental model? LTSpice is useful for analog electronics. You can simulate and see all the waveforms at all the nodes. You can see what small capacitors are doing.
bosunknows 3y ago
Have you seen Spintronics? I'm an EE by training (not professionally) and I've found it super useful to have a fresh mental model for circuits. Not perfect probably, but interesting. Good discussion from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222457
dekhn 3y ago
I've spent some 40 years learning electronics. Started with the hydraulic analogy, but didn't really have any deep understanding. In college they made us do a physics lab with an ocope and RC circuits, and I was miserably. Who cares if you can use discrete components to make a curve when you have a 486? Years later I landed on a team of makers and started to work on ambitious projects- various high power LEDs, motion control systems, etc. This is where my gap in knowledge- especially wrt high power electronics, diodes, and any chip-based component- became a real problem. So I built ambitious stuff and when it didn't work, or was flaky, I'd show it to somebody who knew electronics deeply and they'd explain whatever the next thing on my list to learn was- pull-up resistors, constant current supplies, MOSFETs to control high power devices, connecting up an SPI bus between a microcontroller and sensor, schmitt triggers, bias, etc. I got really good at making small repros of larger projects, handing them to somebody, having them solve the basic problem, then taking the learnign from the repo and putting it into the real project. Eventually, after doing that a lot I was able to to read Art of Electronics and got a lot more out of it. most recently I was building a custom circuit to drive a vacuum tube and had some problems, and somebody mentioned Spice. So i got LTSpice and put my circuit in, and learned just enough to have it spit out what I was seeing in real-life on my oscope. OH MY GOD, it was a revelation. The simulation produced exactly what I saw and I quickly debugged the problems. This has always been true- if I have a simulation, I can learn to intuit how things work faster than if I have to assemble them manually. My mental model now is all about modularity- building the individual bits of a larger circuit, debugging those, then integrating them together. There are so many details in analog that you have to be aware of; if you're missing a pull-up resistor or a schmitt trigger or have too much EMI, you might get it to work 30% of the time or have to do bounce elimination in software. Another thing to be aware of is in the past 20-30 years, a lot of discrete components gained alternatives that were chip-based and move a lot of the smarts into the chip. Sure, you can build an H-bridge from components to make a bidirectional motor driver. But that motor driver from Pololu has decades of intelligence about driving motors- and reverse polarity protection (I plug things in backwards all the time) and self-limiting (if you push too much power, it shuts down, instead of frying). I've had problems with components that could have been solved by an EE. I don't know if I could actually design any non-trivial circuit, but then, what exactly do you need to design today? Most of the work is in identifying what your problem is, then finding the existing solutions.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
szundi 3y ago
I have learned electronics and now can design gps trackers and other equipments by myself after these: - eevblog (youtube), particularly the “fundamental fridays” episodes - Andreas Spiess (youtube) - different topics looked up mentioned on these
reaperman 3y ago
As a hobbyist, the transformation for me came when I started using (and then purchased) an oscilloscope. My dad always made me think they were not helpful to hobbyists but nothing about electronics made sense until I could see the electricity. That and calculus-based Physics 2 in college.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Oscilloscopes are insanely attainable now too. You can get a decent basic model for under $100. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t have imagined having access to the level of hobbyist affordable equipment that exists now.
  - wrycoder 3y ago
    Yeah, and good VNAs for under $100, too!
Wherecombinator 3y ago
I’ve built two RE 303s and 1 Dinsync Gilbert and not really have a clue how they worked. It’s just been paint by numbers. Hoping to actually understand what’s going on in the next few months. This guy Moritz Klein has a YouTube channel explaining the wizardry behind analog synths: https://youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0 https://youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0 I’ve watched the VCO one and it helped in my understanding but I still need to breadboard it to fully grasp it. He has a collaboration with Erica synths that not only results in a cool euro rack synth but also provides a explanatory manual. This coupled with the YouTube videos I think will help in my understanding of circuitry. https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/diy-kits-1/mki-x-esedu-diy-system/ https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/diy-kits-1/mki-x-esedu-diy-s...
nunuvit 3y ago
Like you said, you first have to learn to reason about a circuit. You'll need some broadly applicable skills that give you insight, not more connect-the-dots recipes or brute-force math. There are many insightful graphical techniques that enthusiasts can use with at most basic arithmetic and special graph paper. Probably the best skill investment you can make is learning to sketch on impedance paper. It will demystify passive networks, and it's a gateway to so many other techniques like Bode plots. Eventually you won't even need the special paper most of the time. I recommend getting one printed and laminated to use with a dry-erase marker. It's best to learn the analysis along with how to simulate it and take the measurement. The discrepancies will reveal problems with the circuit, measurement errors, and limitations of the models. Your sketches will show how it works, you'll visually see what needs to be done even before you know how to do it, and you can play with design ideas right on the sketch. There are of course many other techniques for different situations. If you use discrete transistors, maybe learn to sketch a load line and check if a resistor is bad using a multimeter. If you do radio, learn to do impedance matching with a Smith chart.
- nunuvit 3y ago
  * resistor --> transistor
dghlsakjg 3y ago
For digital electronics I recommend Ben eater’s series and kits. Basically starts with an assumption that you understand very basic direct current (as in you know that current flows from a voltage source to ground), and takes you all the way through building a vary basic computer. I would also recommend building your own project, and having it made at one of the Chinese fab houses. Even something as simple as replicating an Arduino will teach you A LOT. I productized an arduino prototype by self teaching, and it’s all really not that hard once you get a grasp of the basics.
ezconnect 3y ago
There are lots of free circuit simulators right now that you can use on PC or mobile devices as native app or in the web browser. Some even have animations of voltage and current movement.
analog31 3y ago
I think there's an in-between that's missing here. Folks who design electronic circuits don't typically compose a circuit directly from the properties of the parts. Instead, there are a lot of slightly higher level design elements, kind of like algorithms in programming, that you combine to make something work. Examples are the many basic op amp circuits, lower level circuits such as transistor gain stages, and so forth. Studying enough of those circuits, you begin to recognize them in schematics, and this gives you a clue as to what the design is doing. I'm not sure that there's a good way around spending a lot of time memorizing those patterns. There are also simplified operational models of some components such as transistors and op amps. Assembling kits is a valuable first step, in that it gets your hands working. Being a bit more confident about your construction practices helps when you later try to make your own stuff, because you don't have to wonder if something like a solder joint is working. The more you can trust that your build is modeled by your schematic, the better a chance of locating the place where it isn't. That's your failure point. I was a physics major in college, but a year of electronics was part of our curriculum. It was taught from The Art of Electronics, first edition. We were also required to buy the National Semiconductor Linear Applications Handbook, and a book on a mainstream IC logic family, which was TTL at the time. That stuff is all available online. I was fascinated with this stuff, so I read the applications handbook from cover to cover. IC application notes are still a good thing to study. You can take another route. There's gobs of stuff you can do with a microcontroller board and pre-made peripherals such as sensors and actuators. It won't turn you into an analog jock, but it's a legitimate design method and might suit your fancy.
brunooo 3y ago
In addition to Eevblog and other great resources mentioned, the two things that helped me most with that are the Phil’s Lab YouTube channel and Arlektra educational kit: - https://m.youtube.com/c/phils94 https://m.youtube.com/c/phils94 - https://www.arstemlabs.com/arlektra-mini https://www.arstemlabs.com/arlektra-mini
someguydave 3y ago
I mean, it seems to me that to “build an intuitive understanding” you need to use calculus or at least algebra, so you can model the circuit components mathematically in the time domain and the frequency domain.
- atoav 3y ago
  As someone who did the math after gaining an intuitive understanding of circuits, I still tend to design circuits by intuition first and do the math after. Imagine something like: "This needs to be biased a little bit more positive, here we use a precision diode, that needs a little bit of negative feedback, ..." Math is important, but much more important (IMO) is a systemic understanding of how parts of the ciecuit influence each other and where they are (or should be) decoupled more or less.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
>> if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB) To be fair, that’s probably the correct first step in most cases. You might move on to tracing powers and grounds in the search for basic catastrophic faults, you might wipe IPA over the board and look for the bit that evaporates first (or if you’re fancy then an IR camera looking for suspect hot spots sinking excess current), but the first step on an unknown failure is probably always going to be a look and a sniff.
samtho 3y ago
Great Scott has a fantastic channel and does a lot to explain the theory in a practical way. Check out his electronics basics videos first if you need a refresher but he does a lot of designs from scratch that are very insightful. https://www.youtube.com/@greatscottlab https://www.youtube.com/@greatscottlab
_yb2s 3y ago
I hear a lot of negative things about using “plumbing” metaphors for teaching electronics, but it has always worked for me. I have an intuitive understanding of what each part does through physical analogy with water pressure, and can design fairly complex analog circuits that work based on it. For example, I see a capacitor as a stretchy membrane… it can’t pass electricity/water, but can stretch to absorb energy and release it later. It can conduct pressure waves by oscillating (ac). Edit: this is a good description https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/understanding-electricity-with-hydrodynamics/#:~:text=An%20inductor%20is%20also%20very,turning%20at%20a%20steady%20rate https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/understa.... To be fair, I have a physics and engineering background and do really understand how these components actually work, and where this metaphor breaks down, but I still find this mental model is what I use to intuitively design circuits that work.

ploxiln 3y ago

I think you just have to start: have an idea for something slightly different than any of your kits do, assemble it on a breadboard, go through the pain of troubleshooting it (and maybe working-around issues you can't quite solve directly). After that, blog posts and youtube videos about other people's little projects will be of more value, you'll be able to really think about the circuit they designed in a different way, it'll have some concrete ideas in your brain to make connections to. (This is how I think about software too fwiw. Start trying to write something on your own, then study the technical detail after, the technical detail will have something to relate to instead of just floating abstractly away. Then try to apply it yourself again, you'll probably be excited to use it at that point.)

jakewins 3y ago

I have (had? getting better!) this same issue, and it really killed excitement of electronics for me for a long time. I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do <x> for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848 I do think there'd be a lot of value in blog or youtube series of experienced circuit designers showing how they approach things, why and how they pick components etc, it's a great way to learn. The blog post that HN thread is about is really good as an example. I've had several people recommend "The Art of Electronics" as a reference for circuits building as well, but haven't read it yet

wholinator2 3y ago
Highly relieved to see this as I've just bought a copy of the art of electronics (2nd edition, 3rd is too expensive for me) and plan to build some things at the university lab this summer
penguin_booze 3y ago
Are there any YT series that are worthy of mention? I think I've a PDF copy of The Art of Electronics. One day...
- szundi 3y ago
  Eevblog
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    EEVBlog is great, but... anybody just discovering the channel should be aware, Dave puts out content that fits into a number of different categories: educational, entertainment, edutainment, test equipment reviews / teardowns, mailbag, repairs, debunking, meta commentary about Youtube, career stuff, and "other". And purely educational stuff isn't a huge part of what he puts out these days. That said, he has put out some really good stuff, especially back when he was doing "Fundamentals Friday" as a routine thing. Just don't expect a steady stream of purely educational, "electronics fundamentals" stuff.

georgeoliver 3y ago

Give the book Practical Electronics for Inventors a try.

penguin_booze 3y ago
Will do. I had picked up that from a link from one of the earlier comments.
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  This book will get you farther faster than The Art of Electronics.

StingyJelly 3y ago

It's a bit like scripting in python vs C on limiting hardware. Even some people with fresh EE degree struggle with this. Modern design often heavily focuses on simulation and reusing the company's IP blocks. Companies try to push for this approach despite the inefficiencies exactly because they can then hire those fresh "unripe" engineers. Old-school engineers almost always come up with better ad-hoc circuit designs trough. If you live near a university, you can probably sit in on lectures (analog-design, analog circuits, microelectronics). There are also many videos on YouTube. (If you're not really interested in repairs, skip those as that is slightly different skillset.) One really good channel is Sam Ben Yaakov's https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov Developing a mental model of circuits also takes practice. The practice can mean simulation or playing with an oscilloscope and components on a breadboard but you need the feedback loop: designing/tweaking the circuit, checking if the behavior matches your expectation, finding what you missed if there's something wrong. Start with simple circuits and gradually work your way up to more complex ones.

penguin_booze 3y ago
I'm in two minds whether I should probably give electronics another go, and with that, investing in devices like a power supply and oscilloscope. Also, I had watched some videos from Behzad Razavi.
- ted_dunning 3y ago
  Before you invest in hardware, grab a free simulator and start without hardware. My favorite is LinSpice because it runs well for free on a mac, but the UI is very quirky. There are web sims available as well. This will let you get started immediately and will let you see what's happening visually.
- StingyJelly 3y ago
  You're on a good track, didn't come to mind but prof. Razavi's lectures are great! As the other person mentioned, you can do a lot in simulation. KiCad now has a builtin ngspice support (trough it's still a bit rough.) On windows, ltspice is another quite popular free option.

jacquesm 3y ago

The way to overcome that is to start off with broken gear and to repair it. You'll be forced bit by bit to understand how the circuits work. It helps if there is a schematic and if there isn't then you'll have to trace the circuit yourself which will help even more in building up a mental model. Of course this all presumes that there is a circuit worth examining to begin with, more often than not these days you'd be looking at a bunch of custom made chips and a few external components too large to fit into the chip which itself contains a microprocessor and a bunch of software to do the heavy lifting. But pick up an 80's tape recorder or amplifier that's busted and you're going to have fun learning. Start on the simplest stuff you can find and work your way up from there.

fuzzfactor 3y ago
Very worthwhile advice here. This bench really looks focused on hobby prototyping, nicely done with that in mind, and with the proper assortment of components in multiples so you can go from idea to funtional circuit directly without encountering the show-stoppers (or delayers) that can be so common otherwise. A repair bench can be made to avoid a somewhat different set of show-stoppers, there will not only be a number of different things more useful at your fingertips, but a deep store of off-bench material and tools still accessible allowing much more powerful operation. Also taking up much more auxiliary space than any one optimized bench. Either way you never avoid all the unforseen show-stoppers, so you need a clear location to shelve & preserve an incomplete prototype or repair/restoration project, for instance while waiting for parts, in order to fully clear the bench for other work which can then be quickly accomplished from start-to-finish. And then there's the "production" bench for hobbyists where prototyping and repair is not so much of a consideration. Collect 'em all.

Animats 3y ago

> Does anyone have any suggestions as to how one can build an intuitive understanding and a mental model? LTSpice is useful for analog electronics. You can simulate and see all the waveforms at all the nodes. You can see what small capacitors are doing.

bosunknows 3y ago

Have you seen Spintronics? I'm an EE by training (not professionally) and I've found it super useful to have a fresh mental model for circuits. Not perfect probably, but interesting. Good discussion from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222457

dekhn 3y ago

I've spent some 40 years learning electronics. Started with the hydraulic analogy, but didn't really have any deep understanding. In college they made us do a physics lab with an ocope and RC circuits, and I was miserably. Who cares if you can use discrete components to make a curve when you have a 486? Years later I landed on a team of makers and started to work on ambitious projects- various high power LEDs, motion control systems, etc. This is where my gap in knowledge- especially wrt high power electronics, diodes, and any chip-based component- became a real problem. So I built ambitious stuff and when it didn't work, or was flaky, I'd show it to somebody who knew electronics deeply and they'd explain whatever the next thing on my list to learn was- pull-up resistors, constant current supplies, MOSFETs to control high power devices, connecting up an SPI bus between a microcontroller and sensor, schmitt triggers, bias, etc. I got really good at making small repros of larger projects, handing them to somebody, having them solve the basic problem, then taking the learnign from the repo and putting it into the real project. Eventually, after doing that a lot I was able to to read Art of Electronics and got a lot more out of it. most recently I was building a custom circuit to drive a vacuum tube and had some problems, and somebody mentioned Spice. So i got LTSpice and put my circuit in, and learned just enough to have it spit out what I was seeing in real-life on my oscope. OH MY GOD, it was a revelation. The simulation produced exactly what I saw and I quickly debugged the problems. This has always been true- if I have a simulation, I can learn to intuit how things work faster than if I have to assemble them manually. My mental model now is all about modularity- building the individual bits of a larger circuit, debugging those, then integrating them together. There are so many details in analog that you have to be aware of; if you're missing a pull-up resistor or a schmitt trigger or have too much EMI, you might get it to work 30% of the time or have to do bounce elimination in software. Another thing to be aware of is in the past 20-30 years, a lot of discrete components gained alternatives that were chip-based and move a lot of the smarts into the chip. Sure, you can build an H-bridge from components to make a bidirectional motor driver. But that motor driver from Pololu has decades of intelligence about driving motors- and reverse polarity protection (I plug things in backwards all the time) and self-limiting (if you push too much power, it shuts down, instead of frying). I've had problems with components that could have been solved by an EE. I don't know if I could actually design any non-trivial circuit, but then, what exactly do you need to design today? Most of the work is in identifying what your problem is, then finding the existing solutions.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

szundi 3y ago

I have learned electronics and now can design gps trackers and other equipments by myself after these: - eevblog (youtube), particularly the “fundamental fridays” episodes - Andreas Spiess (youtube) - different topics looked up mentioned on these

reaperman 3y ago

As a hobbyist, the transformation for me came when I started using (and then purchased) an oscilloscope. My dad always made me think they were not helpful to hobbyists but nothing about electronics made sense until I could see the electricity. That and calculus-based Physics 2 in college.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
Oscilloscopes are insanely attainable now too. You can get a decent basic model for under $100. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t have imagined having access to the level of hobbyist affordable equipment that exists now.
- wrycoder 3y ago
  Yeah, and good VNAs for under $100, too!

Wherecombinator 3y ago

I’ve built two RE 303s and 1 Dinsync Gilbert and not really have a clue how they worked. It’s just been paint by numbers. Hoping to actually understand what’s going on in the next few months. This guy Moritz Klein has a YouTube channel explaining the wizardry behind analog synths: https://youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0 https://youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0 I’ve watched the VCO one and it helped in my understanding but I still need to breadboard it to fully grasp it. He has a collaboration with Erica synths that not only results in a cool euro rack synth but also provides a explanatory manual. This coupled with the YouTube videos I think will help in my understanding of circuitry. https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/diy-kits-1/mki-x-esedu-diy-system/ https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/diy-kits-1/mki-x-esedu-diy-s...

nunuvit 3y ago

Like you said, you first have to learn to reason about a circuit. You'll need some broadly applicable skills that give you insight, not more connect-the-dots recipes or brute-force math. There are many insightful graphical techniques that enthusiasts can use with at most basic arithmetic and special graph paper. Probably the best skill investment you can make is learning to sketch on impedance paper. It will demystify passive networks, and it's a gateway to so many other techniques like Bode plots. Eventually you won't even need the special paper most of the time. I recommend getting one printed and laminated to use with a dry-erase marker. It's best to learn the analysis along with how to simulate it and take the measurement. The discrepancies will reveal problems with the circuit, measurement errors, and limitations of the models. Your sketches will show how it works, you'll visually see what needs to be done even before you know how to do it, and you can play with design ideas right on the sketch. There are of course many other techniques for different situations. If you use discrete transistors, maybe learn to sketch a load line and check if a resistor is bad using a multimeter. If you do radio, learn to do impedance matching with a Smith chart.

nunuvit 3y ago
* resistor --> transistor

dghlsakjg 3y ago

For digital electronics I recommend Ben eater’s series and kits. Basically starts with an assumption that you understand very basic direct current (as in you know that current flows from a voltage source to ground), and takes you all the way through building a vary basic computer. I would also recommend building your own project, and having it made at one of the Chinese fab houses. Even something as simple as replicating an Arduino will teach you A LOT. I productized an arduino prototype by self teaching, and it’s all really not that hard once you get a grasp of the basics.

ezconnect 3y ago

There are lots of free circuit simulators right now that you can use on PC or mobile devices as native app or in the web browser. Some even have animations of voltage and current movement.

analog31 3y ago

I think there's an in-between that's missing here. Folks who design electronic circuits don't typically compose a circuit directly from the properties of the parts. Instead, there are a lot of slightly higher level design elements, kind of like algorithms in programming, that you combine to make something work. Examples are the many basic op amp circuits, lower level circuits such as transistor gain stages, and so forth. Studying enough of those circuits, you begin to recognize them in schematics, and this gives you a clue as to what the design is doing. I'm not sure that there's a good way around spending a lot of time memorizing those patterns. There are also simplified operational models of some components such as transistors and op amps. Assembling kits is a valuable first step, in that it gets your hands working. Being a bit more confident about your construction practices helps when you later try to make your own stuff, because you don't have to wonder if something like a solder joint is working. The more you can trust that your build is modeled by your schematic, the better a chance of locating the place where it isn't. That's your failure point. I was a physics major in college, but a year of electronics was part of our curriculum. It was taught from The Art of Electronics, first edition. We were also required to buy the National Semiconductor Linear Applications Handbook, and a book on a mainstream IC logic family, which was TTL at the time. That stuff is all available online. I was fascinated with this stuff, so I read the applications handbook from cover to cover. IC application notes are still a good thing to study. You can take another route. There's gobs of stuff you can do with a microcontroller board and pre-made peripherals such as sensors and actuators. It won't turn you into an analog jock, but it's a legitimate design method and might suit your fancy.

brunooo 3y ago

In addition to Eevblog and other great resources mentioned, the two things that helped me most with that are the Phil’s Lab YouTube channel and Arlektra educational kit: - https://m.youtube.com/c/phils94 https://m.youtube.com/c/phils94 - https://www.arstemlabs.com/arlektra-mini https://www.arstemlabs.com/arlektra-mini

someguydave 3y ago

I mean, it seems to me that to “build an intuitive understanding” you need to use calculus or at least algebra, so you can model the circuit components mathematically in the time domain and the frequency domain.

atoav 3y ago
As someone who did the math after gaining an intuitive understanding of circuits, I still tend to design circuits by intuition first and do the math after. Imagine something like: "This needs to be biased a little bit more positive, here we use a precision diode, that needs a little bit of negative feedback, ..." Math is important, but much more important (IMO) is a systemic understanding of how parts of the ciecuit influence each other and where they are (or should be) decoupled more or less.

CraigJPerry 3y ago

>> if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB) To be fair, that’s probably the correct first step in most cases. You might move on to tracing powers and grounds in the search for basic catastrophic faults, you might wipe IPA over the board and look for the bit that evaporates first (or if you’re fancy then an IR camera looking for suspect hot spots sinking excess current), but the first step on an unknown failure is probably always going to be a look and a sniff.

samtho 3y ago

Great Scott has a fantastic channel and does a lot to explain the theory in a practical way. Check out his electronics basics videos first if you need a refresher but he does a lot of designs from scratch that are very insightful. https://www.youtube.com/@greatscottlab https://www.youtube.com/@greatscottlab

_yb2s 3y ago

I hear a lot of negative things about using “plumbing” metaphors for teaching electronics, but it has always worked for me. I have an intuitive understanding of what each part does through physical analogy with water pressure, and can design fairly complex analog circuits that work based on it. For example, I see a capacitor as a stretchy membrane… it can’t pass electricity/water, but can stretch to absorb energy and release it later. It can conduct pressure waves by oscillating (ac). Edit: this is a good description https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/understanding-electricity-with-hydrodynamics/#:~:text=An%20inductor%20is%20also%20very,turning%20at%20a%20steady%20rate https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/understa.... To be fair, I have a physics and engineering background and do really understand how these components actually work, and where this metaphor breaks down, but I still find this mental model is what I use to intuitively design circuits that work.