
Ultimate Electronics - tosh
https://ultimateelectronicsbook.com/
======
masto
I don’t want to be a jerk with this comment.. this looks like a great
resource, and it obviously represents a lot of work by a lot of talented
people. But the premise seems to be the same premise that kept me away from a
fun and practical hobby for decades.

I got a Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronics kit for Christmas when I was a little
kit. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but when I tried to go further
with my interest, all I got was equations and theory. For years I just wanted
to understand how a transistor, with only 3 connections, could be like a
relay, which had two pairs of connections and made logical sense to me. Keep
in mind this was pre-Internet, so resources were somewhat limited. In any
case, I eventually gave up on hardware and focused my attention on
programming.

It wasn’t until the advent of the Arduino that the spark was rekindled and I
found a new on ramp to electronics. Start with a breadboard and cookie-cutter
circuits that you don’t really have to understand at first, and control
everything with software, because you know software. Gradually phrases like
“current-limiting resistor” and “bias voltage” start making sense. Watch
people like Dave Jones and Big Clive take things apart on YouTube and reverse
engineer them. The circuits get bigger and more complex. The next project
needs an op-amp, and to your surprise, you can understand the theory now. The
data sheet parameters make sense. You can pick out which 4 of the 5 answers on
the electronics Stack Exchange are wrong, and adapt the right one to your
needs.

I’m having a lot of fun making things, and to answer the question in the
book’s introduction, “have you considered how electron collisions lead to
Ohm’s Law‘s linearity”, the answer is a resounding “no”. And if people hadn’t
told me I needed to consider that to play with electronics, I might not have
missed out on many more years of fun.

~~~
compumike
(Ultimate Electronics Book author here.)

Thanks for the feedback. I had a similar experience starting with one of those
50-in-1 kits! And for me it didn't entirely click until I studied more of the
theory and then looped back to the practical.

I've decided to mix both the theory and the practical here, and if
"conventional academic textbook" is on one end of the spectrum and "Arudino"
is on the other, then I'm aiming somewhere in the middle.

For a recent anecdote: this week, a coworker asked me at lunch, "How does the
wall receptacle know to send more power to a 1500W space heater than to my
MacBook charger?" And that's a great question. And in 15 minutes we ended up
talking about fields and forces and resistive materials and the microscopic
origins of Ohm's Law and hydraulic analogies... and somewhere in there, it
seemed to start to click for him. And that foundation opened the door to his
next question, "So why can't we hear the electrons colliding into the wire?"
And that opened the door to a new topic: of course we can "hear" them if we
just "listen" at the right frequencies, as analog electronic noise.

I'd love to be able to communicate that sort of intuition on a wider scale
than the lunch table!

~~~
masto
I appreciate the response. I hope my story didn’t give the wrong impression.
There are a lot of paths to enlightenment, and who knows what 8-year-old me
could have done with an interactive book.

I could only view it through a mobile device earlier, and now that I’ve had a
more detailed look, I see how the simulation and experimentation aspect adds
another dimension to the theory. I intend to work my way through the whole
thing and see how knowing more of the math will influence my future tinkering.

------
OnACoffeeBreak
I was wondering about the authors of this book. It's in the Introduction:

> Michael F. Robbins holds the S.B. in Electrical Science and Engineering and
> the M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degrees both from
> the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mike is the co-founder of
> CircuitLab, Inc. and developer of the CircuitLab circuit simulation software
> used by universities, hobbyists, and practicing engineers in 196 countries.

It looks like an introductory book to electrical circuits with interactive
simulation exercises built into the book. This should give you an intuitive
understanding of how the math that was presented actually works at the circuit
level, which, I think, is very cool.

~~~
cushychicken
Certainly makes it clear that this is an attempt to commoditize CircuitLab's
complements.

More circuit knowledge = more need for simulation resources. Also serves as a
pretty good SEO resource for CircuitLab.

There are plenty of great analog electronics tutorials out there already that
mostly differ in that they don't point to CircuitLab's material. My personal
favorite is Analog Devices electronics course.

[https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/...](https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/electronics-
toc)

~~~
compumike
(Ultimate Electronics Book author here.)

I'll add that it's also great documentation / example material for how to use
CircuitLab. In fact, that's how it started.

In many ways, circuit simulators are a power user tool, and so I started this
project by just making a larger library of example circuits. It then became
clear that I needed to put the circuits together in context, and the idea for
the textbook popped up since the context many of our customers share (at least
the hobbyist and education segments) is in learning electronics.

Now, I'm inspired by communicating in this part-theory, part-practical style
that seems hard to find in conventional resources.

~~~
cushychicken
It's a good idea on _many_ levels. Power to you!

------
madengr
Looks like a neat book. I’d stress early on, once you get to inductance and
capacitance, that the energy in a circuit is contained in the fields, which
are the consequences of charges (or vice versa). It’s the fields that matter.

When you flip that switch, the drift velocity of charges in (on) the bare
copper is only a few cm/s, but the field propagates at the speed of light,
between the wire and it’s return (mathematically convenient ground). The
energy is around the wires in the fields. The only true ground is at infinity.

If you can get that drilled into your head from early on, it will be
beneficial to high speed circuits and RF. Introductory books never do that.

~~~
jtlienwis
I am an EE with a degree from a big ten university. Now turning 66. What
amazes me about electronics/computer science is how much I do not know and how
much I am still learning.

------
etaioinshrdlu
I was obsessed with electronics from about age 3 or so... I was introduced to
Ohm's law around age 10 or so but having no Algebra knowledge it made
practically no sense. The way current flowed (or didn't flow) was quite
mysterious.

It wasn't until I learned current and voltage laws that the way current flowed
actually made sense.

Analogies were super helpful too. A capacitor is like a rubber membrane that
pressure can build up on. Voltage is pressure. Current is rate of flow. An
inductor is a wheel in the pipe with inertia. A transformer is two
mechanically linked inductors. A Mosfet is a pressure-activated switch. A BJT
is a current-activated switch. A diode is a check valve.

It wasn't until I took Physics in high school/college though, that it all
finally "clicked". All of electronics could be described quite well by those
finicky electrons that repel each other. How a capacitor actually works. How a
charged pointy surface draws the electrons to the point, sometimes enough to
escape. How magnetic fields are actually produced.

Digital electronics was actually much easier especially coming from a
background in computing. It's all logic, you don't really need algebra or
calculus.

Anyways I would like to offer this as a counterpoint and say that learning the
fundamentals and physics made the world of electronics way more satisfying
than to always be tinkering but not really understanding.

I do think though that these topics are really quite difficult to understand
and internalize. Even most practicing EE's I think struggle with really able
to internally translate the physics, and Maxwell's laws into the day to day
work. It is just quite abstract. I know I still struggle with it.

The truth is most EE work is not so different from software where you can get
by most of the time by reading datasheets, basic laws, following working
circuit examples, and relying on what's worked in the past. You don't have to
derive everything from first principles all the time. There is just a wealth
of well understood designs out there to pick from. Additionally a lot of the
work is plumbing and being careful, such as basic PCB design.

------
jimsojim
Recently picked up an interest in electronics, almost finishing up with Ben
Eater videos, this looks amazing!

------
BrandoElFollito
I recently got interested in the IoT world, home made.

Unfortunately I could not go to far because I am missing an "electronics
cookbook".

As an example I wanted to build an internet radio off a Raspberry Pi, hooking
a small amplificator "chip" (a pre made circuit with an IN from the rpi and an
OUT to small loudspeakers).

There was a buzz from the loudspeakers and I am sure an electronician (of
there is such a word) would immediately say "you need a 1 pF capacitor here
and a 200 ohm resistor there because this is a basic Schmidt-Landau-Trump
bridge, obvious in loudspeakers".

I will never understand why a parallel resistor and a capacitor in series is
the way to go, but would love to have a cookbook for such circuits, with some
explanation such as "if it buzzes, uncrease the resistance between 100 and
1000 ohm" \- for the typical circuits one would make in IoT (say, a plant
humidity detector where I have the sensor, the nodemcu and need to kniw what
to use in electronic parts to hook them up).

~~~
OnACoffeeBreak
There are different ways to approach electronics. You can spend a few years
getting formal background in math and electrical engineering, but I don't
think that will necessarily answer the hypothetical question of "why does this
buzz". Anecdotally, I struggled to even get digital circuits working after
several years of electrical engineering university education until someone who
ran our labs told us about bypass capacitors.

Which brings me to another way to learn, which is by hands-on tinkering and
picking up theory where it is needed. I am pretty sure the guy that ran our
labs didn't have a degree in electrical engineering, but he was amazing at
building things and troubleshooting them. Building up intuitive knowledge and
experience also takes years though.

~~~
FpUser
_" Anecdotally, I struggled to even get digital circuits working after several
years of electrical engineering university education until someone who ran our
labs told us about bypass capacitors"_

You're kidding, right? Electrical engineering from University and never heard
of bypass capacitors?

~~~
OnACoffeeBreak
Not kidding. I was a few years in having taken a few analog electrical
engineering courses with labs, signals and systems, a course and a lab on
power before we got to digital circuits. The first course in digital circuits
didn't have a lab. It wasn't until we got to the microprocessors course where
we had to work with a Motorola 68HC11 on a breadboard that the concept of
bypass capacitors was explained to us in a lab. It was 20+ years ago. Maybe
things are different now.

~~~
FpUser
Bypass capacitors are used in analog circuits as well. Not sure what is wrong
about that uni. Anyways I am a former physicist and do not have any formal
education in electronics. I learned electronics on my own and bypass
capacitors were definitely not the last thing to come by.

~~~
BeetleB
> Not sure what is wrong about that uni.

Same experience in my university. I think the curriculum has analogues with
the CS/SW dichotomy. CS programs are not meant to teach you programming.
Similarly, EE programs are not meant to teach you how to build stuff.

In fact, the electronics for physicists course often had more practical
material than you'd get from an EE course.

~~~
unishark
Engineering programs in the US are required by accreditation boards to have
lots of lab courses. One of the primary reasons is the industry advisors on
these boards want graduates to be able to build stuff. And from what I've
seen, it's a lot easier to get an engineering degree by being able to build
stuff but struggling with the math, versus learning a bunch of math but not
being able to build anything. Assessment courses in your final year of school
are required to test you at real-world-level tasks.

Similarly CS is required to have labs which force students to be able to
program. If someone gets a CS degree but can't write a program, they either
cheated their entire way through every programming assignment, or got that
degree at some international university that would never be accredited here.

~~~
alxlaz
This is pretty much the same in EU, modulo some controversy about the exact
point during the course of higher education when you should be expected to be
able to design things on your own.

I have no idea how an EE curriculum doesn't cover bypass capacitors. They're
in virtually every real-world circuit. Even if it's not an item that's
specifically covered in a course, lab or seminar, there's no way you can put a
real-world schematic on the projector and not run into one.

I can't point at a specific course I took where they were covered but I am
sure everyone who made it to the third year knew what they were. I definitely
remember talking about them extensively in at least three courses (Circuit
Theory, Digital Circuits and Digital Instrumentation).

------
todd8
This looks great.

I tinkered with circuits as a kid in the 60’s and subscribed to Popular
Electronics back then—it was may favorite magazine when I was 16 years old.

I always viewed electronics as only a hobby, kind of like being a Ham Radio
enthusiast and went to college to be a mathematician instead. However, I had a
great elective that covered how to build electronic apparatus for scientists.
After all the years of Math, it awakened my old interest in electronics and I
stayed in college for a second degree in EE.

Popular Electronics was a hobby magazine and it was a lot of fun. On the other
hand, a book like this one is more like what one learns when studying for an
engineering degree. It teaches at a level where you can really understand the
circuits you see and gives you the ability to put together your own, not just
wire up projects someone else designed. I wish the author good luck it and
look forward to future chapters. It could be a nice complement to Paul
Horowitz‘a _The Art of Electronics_.

By the way, I know that many HN readers are computer scientists. That’s what I
ended up being, but having a deeper understanding of electronics than most of
the other software guys has opened many doors for me.

------
spectramax
I love interactive books but will the links to Circuit lab will still be alive
40 years from now? I can pick up a book from 1860 and still read it with no
loss in fidelity or information.

I think interactive books are destined to go to the graveyard. I admire the
effort and the medium in every other way - except for aforementioned issue.

------
ivanhoe
Browsing randomly through the content I've noticed that you're discussing
impedance, capacitive/inductive loads and transitional states in the DC
section (and also fairly early in it). I think it'd be way easier to grasp for
someone new to this if it was a section on its own, and after the AC circuits
are already well explained. To tackle this properly mathematically and
understand it well you need to understand a lot of very abstract things like
impedance, phase shifts and complex numbers very well, and IMHO that's much
easier to explain on a stable state AC circuits, and then apply that knowledge
on the on/off transitions too.

------
mtreis86
> Studying electronics will enhance your understanding of calculus

This is absolutely true for me

~~~
yetihehe
Studying [X heavy field] will enhance your understanding of X.

Studying electronics did not enhance my understanding of calculus, but maybe I
didn't study it enough. On a related note, I have grokked logarithms only when
I needed them to implement some graphing module

------
nubbins
You can tell they're not messing around because there are 7 MIT math and
physics courses listed as corequisites. Looks like a fantastic resource. On
the other hand I have no idea when I'd get the time to do this until I retire.
Maybe I'll spend my retirement years like fixing up vintage amplifiers and
designing circuits.

------
nsajko
This looks great, but while one is playing with it (or, alternatively, while
one has classes on electronics), it may be good to know that you do not need
your browser to simulate electr(on)ic circuits: try _ngspice_ (should be
available on all operating systems where one could expect such software;
Unices, Windows, Mac): it is an implementation of the SPICE simulator, but
with many modifications, including scripting support (it has its own language
built-in, or one can use tcl or C to control ngspice). The main difference
while getting started is that one does not lay out schematics while working
with nspice, rather one just describes the circuits as graphs where the edges
are electronic components. It is more abstract in that sense, but I think it
is closer to programmers in these ways, and it provides more power to the
(programming) user. (Note that one would probably draw the graphs on paper
before describing them for SPICE/ngspice.)

EDIT: see
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Sc...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Science#Electronics)
and, especially,
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Sc...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Science#Electronic_circuit_simulation_and_schematic_capture_editing)
for other simulators.

Side question: I would like to get to being able to design PCBs which I could
then get produced and populated in very small quantities, just as a hobby.
What are the fields of knowledge which one should approach before designing
PCBs oneself? Any good books? After that, I would need to choose between gEDA
and KiCAD, while the latter seems to be quite a bit more popular, gEDA's
supposed design in the UNIX philosophy (as a suite of tools that the user uses
through programming/scripting) appeals to me, so does somebody have any
experience with gEDA to share (pros, cons, etc.)?

Another question, more on-topic: could somebody clarify in what cases can we
simulate electronic circuits while representing values with phasors/complex
numbers? As far as I understand there are some limitations, like it is always
a correct identification _if all components are linear_ , or _if the AC parts
of the signals have "small" values compared to the DC parts of the signals_.
Am I mixing stuff up? What are some of the real world situations in which
simulating with phasors breaks down?

~~~
anthk
Back in the day I used TKGate. Not so UNIXy, but it's TCL/TK.

------
tylerpachal
Somewhat related:

I want to build my own electric car, well, convert an ICE car to an electric
one. I have the fabrication skills but I want to learn more about of the
_electric_ stuff (the motor, AC vs DC, the controller, differences in
batteries, etc). Does anyone have a good resource for that?

~~~
driverdan
[https://endless-sphere.com/forums/](https://endless-sphere.com/forums/)

~~~
tylerpachal
Thanks!

------
StapleHorse
Very nice. The interactive examples really make it very appealing for people
learning.

I hope it get completed someday.

------
ausjke
[https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-
current/](https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/) this is
the one I used, very comprehensive and useful.

------
nabnob
Just read through a couple chapters and this is fantastic. Does anyone have a
resource like this (theory-based, but still very hands-on and practical) for
other subjects related to engineering, like say building engines?

------
michelreij
I have bookmarked it and will certainly refer to it in the future. Thanks!

------
2rsf
Cool, waiting for the more fun parts to come up

------
bigmit37
What a lovely book. Thank your for sharing.

------
cheunste
Maybe I'm not the right audience for this as I came from a EE background, but
I really do not see this as a good resource. I feel like the material from
allaboutcircuits.com covers most of the material in this site up until chapter
11 or so and this site only has two volumes written out of 19 planned
chapters.

