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Learn electronics by practice
- fabatka 3y agoFWIW, it's digital electronics
- max_ 3y agoWhat other kinds of "electronics" are there?
- Chris2048 3y agoanalogue
- _Microft 3y agoAnalog electronics [0] uses a continuously variable signal while digital electronics interprets the signal with thresholds that define states like 0 and 1. Here is a simple example: using a few discrete parts, like two transistors (Darlington pair), a LED and resistor, you can create a simple circuit that shows varying brightness of the LED depending on how close you move your hand or an object to an antenna connected to one of the transistors (forming a sort of proximity sensor). No microcontroller, SBC or even a hint of a digital signal involved at all. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_electronics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_electronics
- rramadass 3y ago> Here is a simple example: using a few discrete parts, like two transistors (Darlington pair), a LED and resistor, you can create a simple circuit that shows varying brightness of the LED depending on how close you move your hand or an object to an antenna connected to one of the transistors (forming a sort of proximity sensor) Do you have some book/video/etc. recommendations for this "type" of Electrical/Electronics circuit engineering? I only know how to program a MCU :-(
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- hishamk 3y agoAnalog, of course.
- IndrekR 3y agoMicrowave.
- dktnj 3y agoProbably the wrong way to look at it. Digital electronics doesn't really exist outside of theoretical spaces. It's all analogue underneath and any experienced digital designer will know that and what the consequences for things like signal integrity, noise immunity and latency.
- anthk 3y agoThis. Digital is not that "discrete" as it looks, but just a threshold of values. FFT works on this pretty well, it's the basics.
- tonmoy 3y agoIt’s all about layers of abstraction. A web developer doesn’t need to know about analog circuits to program computers
- II2II 3y agoIt's better to describe analog and digital electronics as a subset of electronics. For the most part, they look at different domains. Even though they are based upon the same underlying principles, the simplifying assumptions are different. A more dramatic example is with RF electronics. While it may look like you are dealing with the same sort of things as the more common low frequency analog electronics, you are going to have a difficult time coaxing an analog circuit to work in the RF domain. Contrast that to web developers. They are dealing with very different principles from web browser developers, who are mostly working with different principles than operating system developers, who are working with entirely different principles from those who design hardware. It's not that they are working with a different subset of the same thing because one layer of abstraction is directly on top of the one below it and (ideally) the layers below completely hide how they work from the layers above.
- dktnj 3y agoThat's a vast difference in the number of layers of abstraction though. Digital electronics is not.
- dragontamer 3y ago
- donw 3y agoRussian.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tiedieconderoga 3y ago"Digital electronics" communicate using discrete values, 1s and 0s. "Analog electronics" communicate using voltage/current/temperature/etc levels. One of the simplest examples is a voltage divider: if you put two resistors across a DC voltage source, like this: V+-[R1]-¢-[R2]-GND The voltage at the ¢ point will be: V+ * (R2 / (R1 + R2)) There are infinite possible values for that voltage, depending on the voltage source and the two resistors. It cannot necessarily be expressed exactly in a digital circuit, and it will fluctuate over time as the environment changes in temperature, humidity, EM noise, and so on. I usually recommend The Art of Electronics as a well-written, beginner-friendly textbook which covers the basic concepts.
- patmorgan23 3y agoAnalog, Radio and television were both developed before digital electronics was.
- Animats 3y agoDigital systems, using relays, predate analog electronics. There were relays used for railroad signaling in the 19th century. Union Switch and Signal was formed in 1881. The first active electronic device, the deForest Audion, was developed in 1906.
- nudgeee 3y agoAnalog Electronics Microwave/RF Electronics Power Electronics
- mindcrime 3y agoClassifications are messy, but in addition to the other items mentioned already, I would say that some people would break out "power electronics"[1] as its own field. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_electronics
- metaphor 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics#Subfields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics#Subfields
- teleforce 3y agoPlease 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+Digital+Hardware+Essentials+for+Scientists+and+Engineers-p-9781118414552 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Electrical,+Electronics,+and+Dig...
- agnosticmantis 3y agoThanks for sharing! Does this teach one how to design circuits too? Also, someone suggested ‘basic electronics: theory and practice’ by Westcott & Westcott [0] for learning hobby electronics. Could someone familiar with both explain how they compare? 0: https://books.google.com/books/about/Basic_Electronics.html?id=PZlfvgAACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Basic_Electronics.html?...
- linker3000 3y agoThe former is more abstract on individual component theory and dives more deeply into the maths as it goes along. It is best suited to study for an electronics certification (or to supplement a main cert such as electrical engineering) if you want to understand the whole gamut of basic principles because, for example, you will be designing complete analogue and digital circuits from scratch. The Westcotts' book is more practical and gets stuck in to building things more quickly. It's not a course syllabus type book and is better for the hobbyist/tinkerer working with tried-and tested, classic chips (timers, amplifiers) and platforms (Raspberry Pi, Arduino).
- agnosticmantis 3y agoThanks for the comparison!
- sriram_malhar 3y agoWow, 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.
- polalavik 3y agoThis is great - been building a list of resources to learn electronics[1] and will definitely be adding this! [1] https://hardwareteams.com/docs/analog/circuits-resouces/ https://hardwareteams.com/docs/analog/circuits-resouces/
- dnlbele 3y agothank you sir! don’t hesitate in contacting me if clarifications needed, will be glad to help
- saboot 3y agoDo any of these books have a purchase list of components to purchase?
- hospitalJail 3y agoIf 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.
- Cyberdog 3y agoI agree that learning with an Arduino/Pi Pico is personally more fun and gets you to the stage of making something practical, or at least interesting, much more quickly. That said, doing things fully at the resistor and diode level still has its place, since someone has to understand stuff well enough at that level to design the Arduinos and Picos that the rest of us play with.
- linker3000 3y agoIf 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 electronics' without any qualification or elaboration.
- hospitalJail 3y agoIdk, 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.
- kaishiro 3y agoI 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 notice that the chip performs the addition of two 4-bit binary words, A and B. ...and the associated diagram, just immediately left me feeling like I was standing in a room full of people who were smarter than me. Is this really where one starts while learning basic electronics?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoNope, here: https://youtu.be/wvJc9CZcvBc https://youtu.be/wvJc9CZcvBc
- matmann2001 3y agoIn 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 of the asynchronous logic theory taught by the time the chips came out.
- mike50 3y agoWas 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.
- simonbarker87 3y agoNot OP but I did Electrical and Electronic Engineering undergrad and we started with diodes at the materials level, then BJT and FET transistors, then logic gates, flip flops, timers, ALUs and eventually working up to build a Motorola 68K micro controller from mid level components. There was some VHDL and FPGA in the later stages as well from memory.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoIt 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 "1-100 Transistor Projects" as a PDF [2] for learning how transistor circuits work. The PDF + breadboard + a dozen or so transistors and small parts will keep you busy. There's a sequel "101-200 Transistor Circuits" [3], one on IC circuits [4] and one on the venerable 555 timer chip [5]. The above should keep you busy for the rest of the year. If not, be sure to skim through some of the electronics hobbyist magazines [6]. [1] https://eater.net https://eater.net [2] https://archive.org/details/1To100TransistorCircuits https://archive.org/details/1To100TransistorCircuits [3] https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/200TrCcts/101-200TrCcts.html https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/200TrCcts/101-20... [4] https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/100%20IC%20Circuits/1-100_IC-Ccts.html https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/100%20IC%20Circu... [5] https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/50%20-%20555%20Circuits/50%20-%20555%20Circuits.html https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/50%20-%20555%20C... [6] https://worldradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm https://worldradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm
- mike50 3y agoSomeone 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.
- SanderNL 3y agoYou ever built a computer this way? If nothing else it’s great fun and kind of magical TBH.
- vector_spaces 3y agoI'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
- aryamaan 3y agoShare more about your journey. These days I am feeling to having an interest rising about such things. Picked Codes book one night and got really hooked up.
- yard2010 3y agoNand2tetris[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/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/
- Cogito 3y agoAnd 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/ https://nandgame.com/
- ttarr 3y agoPersonally, this guy[0] eased me back into electronics, very clear explanations and beginner friendly. [0] https://vocademy.net/ https://vocademy.net/
- cushychicken 3y agoTo 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_i https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/circuits#circuits... And another great one on electronics: https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/electronics-toc 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.
- Vayl 3y agoThanks for this.
- jimmychoozyx 3y agoBest book on the topic for people w/o EE degree who want to learn practical EE (in my humble opinion): "Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition" Book by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk Word on the street is that it can be found on https://libgen.is/ https://libgen.is/
- paphillips 3y agoI miss electronics retail, even with its issues. Radio Shack had the Forrest Mims engineer's notebooks for learning electronics, and it was great to be able to drive down to a Fry's to pick up a component that you needed in a hurry on a weekend. Shout out to Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara, San Mateo Electronics Supply, and of course Jameco, which are still alive. I'm also lamenting the loss of SF Bay area electronics surplus: Weird Stuff, Halted/HSC, and the latest casualty, Excess Solutions. Is there any place left around here to find used/surplus electronics?
- RivieraKid 3y agoIs what this website teaches useful in the real world? What I mean is - is there a demand for people who know digital electronics or is it mainly for people who are curious how chips work?
- eternityforest 3y agoLearn Basic Electronics... Build a legendary ping game.... that escalated quickly! Looks like a really cool resource if you want to do the more old fashioned analog/discrete stuff. Definitely a lot different than what I would probably show someone if they wanted to do hobby level more modern digital work, but it seems perfect for someone who wants to do stuff with transistors and logic gates.
- dnlbele 3y agoThank you sir!