Do you want a set of electronics lessons, CarlHProgramming style?
[deleted]
Posted Jun 4, 2010, 5:25 PM UTC · edited
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http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ may be a good place to start for material. It's very beginner friendly.
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That's a good site but it's missing the discussion and connection to the "teacher" that you get from something like reddit.
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It's a good place to start for material to base lessons on is what I meant. The content is written with beginners in mind, assumes no prior knowledge, and uses great analogies to explain concepts.
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I'm making a course outline and after reading that site a bit, I think it will be great to use as a "textbook" of sorts.
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I didn't notice that, but it's not quite the same.
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I would agree with this having a single experienced teacher is way nicer to having a discussion forum. For the record I would be totally interested in what you have proposed.
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Thank you for the link.
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YES! Yes, I do. I delved a little into electronics when I took a class in highschool and it seemed like it could really be helpful. I learn a lot better with a structured class, so this would be amazing.
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With a focus on practical applications please. There are a million places online to learn how to mod say a guitar amplifier and I am very interested, but I really don't know very much about the foundations of small electronics so bridging the gap would be great.
I've fooled around with broken equipment but I would seriously like to know how to work safely without getting fried or what is even occurring when I try to follow a youtube video on "biasing" an amp.
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You make a good point. If you had some basic electronics knowledge, you would be able to do all those other things without the youtube videos, etc.
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I wouldn't mind contributing to such a project. I'm not an engineer, but I'm an Electronics Engineering Technician, if that would be useful to anyone. Most of my knowledge is strictly in the realm of "practicality", since technicians usually avoid the nitty-gritty physics (though sometimes, it can't be avoided) and stay towards knowing what something does in a broad sense, and how that would change the operation of a device if it were not functioning correctly.
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Ha! I'm an Electronic Engineering Technologist ;)
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Please, please, please make something like this! I would LOVE to learn electronics this way :)
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I'll chip in [I design electronics for a living].
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I'll be in touch if/when I get started on this. :)
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I'll help as well. I design circuits so that I can later tear my hair out.
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I know what you mean. Why doesn't anything ever work on the first try?
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IC what you did there. I'll pitch in too. Purdue's EET program has great lectures online for intro material. Analog Basics
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It'd be kinda cool but you would have to do some hands-on stuff I think for it to stick. With computers that's a bit easier as we all have them. I suppose a circuit simulator might be pretty close though.
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Quite a lot of hands-on stuff could be done with a breadboard, battery, and some extremely cheap components.
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Like decorating my house.
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You've got "interesting" taste in home decor, but to each his/her own...
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you really don't need to change that from his to his/her
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Speaking of breadboards, if you're in the EU, I'll put in a good word for the Wisher 502L+J, which I'm quite pleased with.
Here's the nearest US equivalent I could find - US electronics geeks will almost certainly know of better sources.
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I thought about buying one of those, but I'm quite sure the image doesn't exactly match the product:
"Image is for illustrative purposes only." and "No. of Holes:870". 870 is one of the small ones (2x60x5 plus some holes for Vcc/GND)
I'm buying a bigger one -- 14EUR is quite okay imho.
Farnell is a good supplier for a lot of things, and you can get some real bargains there, but a lot of stuff is just awfully expensive.
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It had never occurred to me to actually look up a circuit simulator program until now. Damn.
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Yeah, they're great to learn theory with, as long as they're accurate. I hear great things about SPICE but haven't used it yet.
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Yes, but don't rely on them too much. A real circuit won't necessarily behave the same way as a simulated one.
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I would subscribe. I have a grasp of the basic theory but there's a big gap between knowing the equations and understanding (for example) what all the capacitors in an LM386 amplifier circuit are actually for. Having recently started trying to make circuits again I've discovered how little I actually know.
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Count me among those who want this.
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Hell yes. What I'd really like to see is something that is a bit more advanced than "This is a resistor. It adds resistance." but a bit easier to get into than the great majority of electronics textbooks, which start off with five dense chapters of atomic theory so you can understand exactly how resistors work.
Something that explains what things do, why that's useful, and how it fits in with other things, without needing to understand the orbit characteristics of doped silicon.
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That's roughly what I have in mind. Detailed enough to learn properly, but not so detailed that most people will be bored. A lot of the fine details aren't important to know in practice. Since I graduated and started working, I haven't heard a single person talk about electron orbits.
Edited: To make sense.
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(Psst. not so detailed, yes?)
Excellent. I'm slowly working my way through the textbooks, but they're all so caught up in marvelous theoretical constructs that I'm having a hard time figuring out why this circuit needs half a dozen 200μF capacitors and a diode, and that one only needs one 500μF cap and three resistors*.
I'll be following along.
*Example pulled out of my arse. May not be electronically valid.
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Good catch :) I agree, sometimes the theories are not as useful as they claim to be.
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Yes! Please... I'm an experienced software developer messing around w/ Arduino, and I know that I'm missing a lot of info to really know what I'm doing.
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Maybe you could also post this at University of reddit.
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That would be exactly what I've been looking for for months now.
How useful would it be to have a set of lessons on reddit (or elsewhere?) starting from "no prior knowledge about electricity?"
Very! I'd personally like to add ", not even the basic stuff you learn in elementary school physics" to that last part. It often seems to be assumed that everyone knows what a coulomb is (Until recently I thought it was either a grape-like berry or one of those wedges you sometimes use to straighten a screwed up concrete mold. I don't know why.) and that V=I*R and so on, but I didn't/don't. I doubt I'm the only one who didn't pay much attention in school or didn't care, but became interested in the subject later in life. Something like this would be perfect for me.
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That's exactly what I meant by "no prior knowledge." Basically starting at "this is an electron."
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Yes, yes... Oh god yes. <-- Imagine a chick screaming this.
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This would be fantastic.
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Ah! Don't do it! Hoarding these secrets is what makes us easily able to awe and confuse with EE technobabble.
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Confuse maybe, awe definitely not.
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Hey. Let me live in my little world.
Also, the capabilities of modern microcontrollers do awe some older engineers who haven't kept up to date on modern EE stuff.
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What awes me is the fact that I can click some menus and then program a microcontroller, multiplexer, transceiver, damn near anything into an FPGA in 20 seconds. Hell, I could probably put 6 of them in there if I wanted to.
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I would really appreciate that.
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Support!
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Just do it
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Yes! The summer holidays are just coming up and I'd like to learn something new...
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<raises hand>
ME!
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Count me in too!
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A cool idea -- lead us through simple projects, explaining theory (why it works) and practical issues (common mistakes, technique finer points).
Components are very cheap, for the most part, and you can side-step soldering entirely via breadboard.
There are a bunch of good sources for beginner's kits (Adafruit, Sparkfun, Evil Mad Scientist) and of course some local radioshacks still sell compenents.
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and you can side-step soldering entirely via breadboard.
That would definitely be the way to start, but I think including soldering skills would be very important.
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Oh absolutely. But I am a big believer in separating out the skills. Even clumsy people can breadboard. With project / prototyping the substrate is often a bigger issue than the connection. You can solder, but to what? Free form like the BEAM guys, where the components are the support (link)? Or perf board? Lots of variables.
Breadboard is really simple, but limited and we will need to progress beyond it for sure.
And for extra credit: wirewrap! (kidding!) You could teach basic soldering, represent the projects photographically as breadboard and soldered.
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Extra credit will be given only for a real breadboard.
Seriously though, I'm not sure giving photos of the circuits is helpful. Part of learning electronics is learning how to read schematics and then use what you see to build your own circuit in whatever way you please.
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I've actually done a lot of work with things pretty close to real breadboards. I teach camps for middle school aged children getting started in electronics, teaching things like basic analog and digital circuits (555s, 7400 series logic chips, transistors, op-amps, etc) and we do all of it on fiber board with copper foil and copper tacks. It's actually a really great platform for kids who can't solder on fine pitched perf board and who want permanent projects to take home. (Sorry for the tangent :P)
Anyways, if you are interested in some decent entry level project ideas, I might be able to help you out. Something really cool for beginners to electronics is the drawdio. I really love them, and they have a lot of advantages:
- very easy to build and debug
- incredibly fun once it is working
- all the parts involved are cheap and easily available
- lots of room for hacks (trying to make it drive a bigger speaker, etc)
- if you have a scope (or if you are careful, a sound card), you get to see a lot of different waves from the square wave output to the capacitor dischargine
- teaches a lot about capacitance and resistance (since it just uses your standard 555 circuit, which is a good entry level for redditors who don't need to review what resistance and capacitance are)
Anyways, I hope that helps :). I'm not very good at advanced EE (I'm just a CS undergrad), but I have a lot of experience designing cheap, fun, easy projects.
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Yes. Please sir, do it.
I would definitely like that. I'm a CS major who has developed an interest in the EE side of things during my schooling. They've recently started combining ECE and CS at my school, but as it is I'm struggling to find the money to take my last two classes without adding a whole bunch of new stuff this close to the end.
This would be fantastic. I just recently got my hands on an arduino and I've been toying around with it but haven't been able to do anything that great because of my lack of knowledge in electronics.