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Need help finding a decent book about electronics
4 points by craftoman on July 29, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I've started working with electronics, bought a basic equipment and start experiencing slightly, 1-2 hours per day. My only problem is that I can't find a decent book that will help me understand modern day appliances and how they work. For example let's say I have an alarm system or a battery charger, I want to know how they work and what components they rely on.



im going to assume you have just started on theory, so i might seem basic but you should crawl some books on electrical theory and some simple gadjet books, like Forrest Mims.

https://www.forrestmims.com/

online resources for "free" exist..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557533

and you should know how to identify components by reading thier numbers and looking up the WhitePaper, the instruction manual for the component. here is a handy place

https://www.alldatasheet.com/

you should have a firm grasp on Ohms law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm%27s_law

and Kirchoffs circuit laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_circuit_laws

It is essential to be able to use these laws along with knowledge/whitepapers of components, so you can predict or explain what is happening at any point in a simple circuit, or a big network of simple ciruits. And thats another thing, no matter how ^intricate^ a PC board looks, its made up of simpler circuits interacting with each other, for example identify the power supply and conditioning section, from the rest of the device circuitry lookup the parts for thier properties, make measurements, compare the measurements to what is expected from white papers and calculations.


Ok thanks for the resources, I know some basic theory about voltage, current, ohm's law and how most of the basic components work and what their purpose, like capacitors or mosfets etc. I want to know more practical things and how house devices work without scrapping every single one of them.


try to obtain abandoned electronics to "dissect" reverse engineering household electronics and appliances is a good start, just mind the dangers in things like microwave ovens TV sets, smoke detectors, and CD lasers. alot of what you see is going to look a lot like, some sort of digital electronics, with some analog control sections, and a power supply section.

there are rules for different types of technology regarding the current voltage and noise allowed.

basically you have resistors capacitors inductors then you have diodes transistors SCRs and other junctions and then you get into ICS such as analog amplifiers transducers of all sorts. then logic and digital electronics such as bus master controllers, or programmable IDEs




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