
US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series - adamnemecek
http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/#
======
wumbernang
These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and
there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and
how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a
collection of facts.

Would recommend The Art of Electronics (just grab the 2nd edition and the
student manual - it's fine) or Practical Electronics for Inventors.

Also stay away from Mimms books[1] and Make stuff. They're mostly glossy crap
that doesn't actually have any content and are chock full of mistakes.

If you want to wire shit to an arduino, don't buy a book, just google it.

[1] Yes I know this is controversial but I started there and had to unlearn it
all. It's a bad foundation.

~~~
mpyne
> These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and
> there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is
> and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is
> just a collection of facts.

Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk
Maxwell.

They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science
training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the
specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.

So yes, _everything_ about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and
often even "dumbed down".

So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take
college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-
learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.

~~~
weland
> They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science
> training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the
> specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet
> applications.

The key here is "maintain, operate and repair".

Army training manuals are generally great for that.

They are _not_ a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to
learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.

~~~
jebblue
I learned enough to know that a lot of people designing electronics taught by
civilian colleges should have gone into the military first and learned how
electronics works and what it gets subjected to in the field and how it can
fail miserably and how us grease monkeys out there had to come up with often
extremely clever, unimaginable fixes for the design goofs made by those
civilian graduates who thought of themselves so highly.

~~~
wumbernang
Ah yes my favourite people.

So our radios and avionics go out with a test set. The wrench monkeys install
it in the airframe and it doesn't work (the term used by the guy on the
phone). So we say take the thing out of the airframe, plug it into the test
set and run the test cases. We get a call back saying it doesn't work and can
we come out.

So I haul my arse up to the other end of the country by plane and arrive at
the facility. What do I find?

They haven't used the test set (because it didn't work), opened the avionics
unit and piddled with the power supply and managed to blow up both the test
set and the GPS. This is blamed on a design fault on our part.

So I get the units shipped back and we post mortem it and find that they were
using the wrong harness. The one we get bak is from a completely different
unit and serial.

Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects 48v
DC

This was my life for three years.

That's also why so much cash gets pissed out of the window in the defense
sector...

~~~
CamperBob2
_Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects
48v DC_

To be fair, if you made a change like that and didn't change the harness to
make it physically incompatible, that's not the user's fault. It might not be
_your_ fault either, but it most assuredly is _somebody 's_ fault.

~~~
wumbernang
Well it's always someone's fault.

In this case there are only so many combinations of MIL-DTL-22992 out there.

It wasn't even our harness. No idea where it came from. Serno didn't register,
wasn't shipped with the device and wasn't approved (I know as I wrote the
asset tracking software).

I still reckon they lost the official harness, rigged this one up and FUBARed
it but the moment you point a finger, the professional cockroaches scurry
away.

------
bazillion
I started on these books (we of course called them the NEETS modules) when I
was 19 in electronic warfare school, and they are the exact same books that my
dad used when he was an 18 year-old sonar technician in training. As others
have pointed out in the thread, these are targeted towards an audience of
those with an _aptitude_ for electronics, and are therefore meant to give them
a practical understanding of how to work with complex military electronic
systems. You'll see mentions of things like electricity flowing from positive
to negative and more complex concepts reduced down to simpler ones.

The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to
being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and
replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman
technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information
they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical
concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the
component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane
wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and
therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets
to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to
save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.

With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes
on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of
the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take
these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and
the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure
of success of these books.

------
finnn
On the same site: Navy Electronic Warfare Manual[1]

[1][http://jacquesricher.com/EWhdbk/](http://jacquesricher.com/EWhdbk/)

------
ganzuul
It feels like a mistake to separate the literature on oscillators and
amplifiers...

~~~
mpyne
Well, read the section on DC "amplidyne" motors and you'll see that their
conception of an amplifier is more general than you might be expecting. :)

------
vishaldpatel
I love stuff like this. We should have a site where resources can be
bookmarked ... like pins if you will. And.. and we can follow certain topics
of our interest. And we can call it Pinterest! And then we can keep hacker
news for news :D

~~~
nitrogen
It's the non-news that keeps me coming to HN. Current events are often of
limited relevance to real life. Hearing about the latest manufactured
controversy does zero to make me a better person. I'd much rather learn
something of lasting value.

