I used be an ameteur electronics enthusiast. When I was young, I used to assemble trivial circuits (dancing lights etc.): I could go to an electronics shop. They used to sell hobby kits for simple, accessible, devices. The kit had circuit layout, component list, labels, what goes where and all. I then assembled them per the layout ("this leg of the transistor goes to the left leg of the capacitor"). It worked - I used to be quite pleased with myself, and used to show that off to other people. No mentors; no one to consult on my doubts. I was "self-made".
But the thing is that I never had a clear idea of how it worked; or, if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB). That condition is what I now realize as being unable to reason about the circuit at hand. As in, how would I arrive at that circuit by myself - being able to point at components and say, "this guy does this, and the other guy does this, and voila, we've dancing light".
I can name individual components and stuff, and can wave my hands and say what it does individually. The fact that I can't compose a circuit from scratch still gets me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how one can build an intuitive understanding and a mental model?
EDIT: it just occurred to me "dancing lights" are called Astable Multivibrator! We were taught this at school, after I built them. Oh, I still can remember how smug I felt!
I have (had? getting better!) this same issue, and it really killed excitement of electronics for me for a long time.
I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do <x> for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848
I do think there'd be a lot of value in blog or youtube series of experienced circuit designers showing how they approach things, why and how they pick components etc, it's a great way to learn. The blog post that HN thread is about is really good as an example.
I've had several people recommend "The Art of Electronics" as a reference for circuits building as well, but haven't read it yet
The Art of Electronics is useful as a reference, certainly.
Using it to learn circuit design (just at the schematic level, still) would take serious effort (hundreds of hours) and would be far more effective if done with a skilled instructor.
There used to be simpler, smaller books that showed a simplified design process for circuit building blocks.
Rod Elliott's website, sound-au.com, has an extensive section on "theory" at the hobbyist level[1]. If you use it, please donate to help Rod keep the site up.
> I've had several people recommend "The Art of Electronics" as a reference for circuits building as well, but haven't read it yet
It's an excellent book and highly regarded for a reason. I have a pro-tip about it, though... don't feel as if you need the most recent edition. The older ones are still great and relevant, and buying it used will save you a few bucks.
Highly relieved to see this as I've just bought a copy of the art of electronics (2nd edition, 3rd is too expensive for me) and plan to build some things at the university lab this summer
I think there's an in-between that's missing here. Folks who design electronic circuits don't typically compose a circuit directly from the properties of the parts. Instead, there are a lot of slightly higher level design elements, kind of like algorithms in programming, that you combine to make something work. Examples are the many basic op amp circuits, lower level circuits such as transistor gain stages, and so forth. Studying enough of those circuits, you begin to recognize them in schematics, and this gives you a clue as to what the design is doing. I'm not sure that there's a good way around spending a lot of time memorizing those patterns.
There are also simplified operational models of some components such as transistors and op amps.
Assembling kits is a valuable first step, in that it gets your hands working. Being a bit more confident about your construction practices helps when you later try to make your own stuff, because you don't have to wonder if something like a solder joint is working. The more you can trust that your build is modeled by your schematic, the better a chance of locating the place where it isn't. That's your failure point.
I was a physics major in college, but a year of electronics was part of our curriculum. It was taught from The Art of Electronics, first edition. We were also required to buy the National Semiconductor Linear Applications Handbook, and a book on a mainstream IC logic family, which was TTL at the time. That stuff is all available online. I was fascinated with this stuff, so I read the applications handbook from cover to cover. IC application notes are still a good thing to study.
You can take another route. There's gobs of stuff you can do with a microcontroller board and pre-made peripherals such as sensors and actuators. It won't turn you into an analog jock, but it's a legitimate design method and might suit your fancy.
It's a bit like scripting in python vs C on limiting hardware. Even some people with fresh EE degree struggle with this. Modern design often heavily focuses on simulation and reusing the company's IP blocks. Companies try to push for this approach despite the inefficiencies exactly because they can then hire those fresh "unripe" engineers. Old-school engineers almost always come up with better ad-hoc circuit designs trough.
If you live near a university, you can probably sit in on lectures (analog-design, analog circuits, microelectronics). There are also many videos on YouTube. (If you're not really interested in repairs, skip those as that is slightly different skillset.) One really good channel is Sam Ben Yaakov's https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov
Developing a mental model of circuits also takes practice. The practice can mean simulation or playing with an oscilloscope and components on a breadboard but you need the feedback loop: designing/tweaking the circuit, checking if the behavior matches your expectation, finding what you missed if there's something wrong. Start with simple circuits and gradually work your way up to more complex ones.
The way to overcome that is to start off with broken gear and to repair it. You'll be forced bit by bit to understand how the circuits work. It helps if there is a schematic and if there isn't then you'll have to trace the circuit yourself which will help even more in building up a mental model. Of course this all presumes that there is a circuit worth examining to begin with, more often than not these days you'd be looking at a bunch of custom made chips and a few external components too large to fit into the chip which itself contains a microprocessor and a bunch of software to do the heavy lifting.
But pick up an 80's tape recorder or amplifier that's busted and you're going to have fun learning. Start on the simplest stuff you can find and work your way up from there.
This bench really looks focused on hobby prototyping, nicely done with that in mind, and with the proper assortment of components in multiples so you can go from idea to funtional circuit directly without encountering the show-stoppers (or delayers) that can be so common otherwise.
A repair bench can be made to avoid a somewhat different set of show-stoppers, there will not only be a number of different things more useful at your fingertips, but a deep store of off-bench material and tools still accessible allowing much more powerful operation. Also taking up much more auxiliary space than any one optimized bench.
Either way you never avoid all the unforseen show-stoppers, so you need a clear location to shelve & preserve an incomplete prototype or repair/restoration project, for instance while waiting for parts, in order to fully clear the bench for other work which can then be quickly accomplished from start-to-finish.
And then there's the "production" bench for hobbyists where prototyping and repair is not so much of a consideration.
Like you said, you first have to learn to reason about a circuit. You'll need some broadly applicable skills that give you insight, not more connect-the-dots recipes or brute-force math. There are many insightful graphical techniques that enthusiasts can use with at most basic arithmetic and special graph paper.
Probably the best skill investment you can make is learning to sketch on impedance paper. It will demystify passive networks, and it's a gateway to so many other techniques like Bode plots. Eventually you won't even need the special paper most of the time. I recommend getting one printed and laminated to use with a dry-erase marker.
It's best to learn the analysis along with how to simulate it and take the measurement. The discrepancies will reveal problems with the circuit, measurement errors, and limitations of the models. Your sketches will show how it works, you'll visually see what needs to be done even before you know how to do it, and you can play with design ideas right on the sketch.
There are of course many other techniques for different situations. If you use discrete transistors, maybe learn to sketch a load line and check if a resistor is bad using a multimeter. If you do radio, learn to do impedance matching with a Smith chart.
I hear a lot of negative things about using “plumbing” metaphors for teaching electronics, but it has always worked for me. I have an intuitive understanding of what each part does through physical analogy with water pressure, and can design fairly complex analog circuits that work based on it. For example, I see a capacitor as a stretchy membrane… it can’t pass electricity/water, but can stretch to absorb energy and release it later. It can conduct pressure waves by oscillating (ac).
To be fair, I have a physics and engineering background and do really understand how these components actually work, and where this metaphor breaks down, but I still find this mental model is what I use to intuitively design circuits that work.
Great Scott has a fantastic channel and does a lot to explain the theory in a practical way. Check out his electronics basics videos first if you need a refresher but he does a lot of designs from scratch that are very insightful.
For digital electronics I recommend Ben eater’s series and kits. Basically starts with an assumption that you understand very basic direct current (as in you know that current flows from a voltage source to ground), and takes you all the way through building a vary basic computer.
I would also recommend building your own project, and having it made at one of the Chinese fab houses. Even something as simple as replicating an Arduino will teach you A LOT.
I productized an arduino prototype by self teaching, and it’s all really not that hard once you get a grasp of the basics.
Have you seen Spintronics? I'm an EE by training (not professionally) and I've found it super useful to have a fresh mental model for circuits. Not perfect probably, but interesting.
I’ve built two RE 303s and 1 Dinsync Gilbert and not really have a clue how they worked. It’s just been paint by numbers. Hoping to actually understand what’s going on in the next few months.
This guy Moritz Klein has a YouTube channel explaining the wizardry behind analog synths:
I’ve watched the VCO one and it helped in my understanding but I still need to breadboard it to fully grasp it.
He has a collaboration with Erica synths that not only results in a cool euro rack synth but also provides a explanatory manual. This coupled with the YouTube videos I think will help in my understanding of circuitry.
I think you just have to start: have an idea for something slightly different than any of your kits do, assemble it on a breadboard, go through the pain of troubleshooting it (and maybe working-around issues you can't quite solve directly). After that, blog posts and youtube videos about other people's little projects will be of more value, you'll be able to really think about the circuit they designed in a different way, it'll have some concrete ideas in your brain to make connections to.
(This is how I think about software too fwiw. Start trying to write something on your own, then study the technical detail after, the technical detail will have something to relate to instead of just floating abstractly away. Then try to apply it yourself again, you'll probably be excited to use it at that point.)
>> if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB)
To be fair, that’s probably the correct first step in most cases. You might move on to tracing powers and grounds in the search for basic catastrophic faults, you might wipe IPA over the board and look for the bit that evaporates first (or if you’re fancy then an IR camera looking for suspect hot spots sinking excess current), but the first step on an unknown failure is probably always going to be a look and a sniff.
There are lots of free circuit simulators right now that you can use on PC or mobile devices as native app or in the web browser. Some even have animations of voltage and current movement.
In addition to Eevblog and other great resources mentioned, the two things that helped me most with that are the Phil’s Lab YouTube channel and Arlektra educational kit:
As a hobbyist, the transformation for me came when I started using (and then purchased) an oscilloscope. My dad always made me think they were not helpful to hobbyists but nothing about electronics made sense until I could see the electricity.
I have learned electronics and now can design gps trackers and other equipments by myself after these:
- eevblog (youtube), particularly the “fundamental fridays” episodes
- Andreas Spiess (youtube)
- different topics looked up mentioned on these
I mean, it seems to me that to “build an intuitive understanding” you need to use calculus or at least algebra, so you can model the circuit components mathematically in the time domain and the frequency domain.
As someone who did the math after gaining an intuitive understanding of circuits, I still tend to design circuits by intuition first and do the math after.
Imagine something like: "This needs to be biased a little bit more positive, here we use a precision diode, that needs a little bit of negative feedback, ..."
Math is important, but much more important (IMO) is a systemic understanding of how parts of the ciecuit influence each other and where they are (or should be) decoupled more or less.
I've spent some 40 years learning electronics. Started with the hydraulic analogy, but didn't really have any deep understanding. In college they made us do a physics lab with an ocope and RC circuits, and I was miserably. Who cares if you can use discrete components to make a curve when you have a 486?
Years later I landed on a team of makers and started to work on ambitious projects- various high power LEDs, motion control systems, etc. This is where my gap in knowledge- especially wrt high power electronics, diodes, and any chip-based component- became a real problem. So I built ambitious stuff and when it didn't work, or was flaky, I'd show it to somebody who knew electronics deeply and they'd explain whatever the next thing on my list to learn was- pull-up resistors, constant current supplies, MOSFETs to control high power devices, connecting up an SPI bus between a microcontroller and sensor, schmitt triggers, bias, etc.
I got really good at making small repros of larger projects, handing them to somebody, having them solve the basic problem, then taking the learnign from the repo and putting it into the real project.
Eventually, after doing that a lot I was able to to read Art of Electronics and got a lot more out of it. most recently I was building a custom circuit to drive a vacuum tube and had some problems, and somebody mentioned Spice. So i got LTSpice and put my circuit in, and learned just enough to have it spit out what I was seeing in real-life on my oscope. OH MY GOD, it was a revelation. The simulation produced exactly what I saw and I quickly debugged the problems. This has always been true- if I have a simulation, I can learn to intuit how things work faster than if I have to assemble them manually.
My mental model now is all about modularity- building the individual bits of a larger circuit, debugging those, then integrating them together. There are so many details in analog that you have to be aware of; if you're missing a pull-up resistor or a schmitt trigger or have too much EMI, you might get it to work 30% of the time or have to do bounce elimination in software.
Another thing to be aware of is in the past 20-30 years, a lot of discrete components gained alternatives that were chip-based and move a lot of the smarts into the chip. Sure, you can build an H-bridge from components to make a bidirectional motor driver. But that motor driver from Pololu has decades of intelligence about driving motors- and reverse polarity protection (I plug things in backwards all the time) and self-limiting (if you push too much power, it shuts down, instead of frying). I've had problems with components that could have been solved by an EE.
I don't know if I could actually design any non-trivial circuit, but then, what exactly do you need to design today? Most of the work is in identifying what your problem is, then finding the existing solutions.
Thanks, I've been doubting whether to buy a oscilloscope or not for about two years and your comment pushed me over the edge. I just ordered a Siglent SDS1104X-E. I have the same lack of intuition for electronics and I hope seeing the behavior will help me build a better mental model.
This is just a fantastic page, why aren't more on the internet like this, with specific parts lists and sources? Very similar to the stations we had when I was doing computer repair a decade ago (no, I will not fix your computer.™) and out of everything on there, be sure to get a good ESD mat, or else you'll never stop chasing random glitches.
I just want to add that the best way to get over starting friction is to have everything ready to go like this. IMHO it's much easier to take care of the low-hanging fruit of arranging and cleaning, than it is to have to do that and THEN work. I struggle with organization though, so I treat that as an active exercise and devote 15 minutes at a time to the chore, rewarding myself with a cup of coffee or whatever afterwards.
FWIW, I bet the guy has an ESD mat and it was just too ugly to show.
The only other thing I would add is boxes or large bins. Not for tools or components, but for project work, so you can put it away and work on something else when you need to.
Thank you, my nature is to have everything out like him because I think I might have object permanence issues and other ADHD symptoms like time blindness. I feel like I know exactly where everything is that I've ever handled, but once it's organized, I almost lose track of it like a goto.
Discipline is such a struggle for me that I got rid of all of the furniture in my home office and put up a couple of Ikea Billy bookcases with long shelves that wrap around my desk in an upside-down U so that I can see everything on one wall.
Kind of like these, but with a full-size desk and $20 shelves spanning the middle, in birch:
My scopecart was off to the side like that most of the time except when it rolled over to a chemical instrument in the main lab which needed repair or calibration.
Most people who saw my lab when I was in private practice would not have noticed any difference from this museum piece.
> why aren't more on the internet like this, with specific parts lists and sources?
There are forums where people post pictures of their benches, but it's a lot of work to document everything and you're going to use whichever distributor has sufficiently similar items in stock at your price point and can ship to your country.
I maintained page like this, only to have it penalized by Google when they started cracking down on a particular type of SEO spam.
But another problem is that such pages are just really hard to maintain. In a year or two, half of the items you're liking to are going to be out of production. This is especially true for stuff like no-name test equipment, low-cost breadboards, etc. There's just no stable brand or URL to use.
I definitely agree. As someone who is very tinker-minded, I've had various "workbench" setups on my desk. These range from watch repair, to gunsmithing, to electronics repair, to woodworking.
I'd LOVE if all of those hobbies had a concise, illustrated guide to not only the tools I should get, but *how to organize them*. Organizing is a strength of mine on a computer, where every file fits in every folder and there's no limits of size or shape. But tell me to organize my office, and I'll end up with a perfect system that goes entirely out of whack as soon as one item is added or removed.
And, there are no burn marks on that desk or the mat, the trash bin is empty instead of full of Jolt or Rockstar cans, and those cables? Not a single knot.
The bins are labeled and the label matching items in the bins.
Those stacked containers on the right middle shelf? Never would be put back in that fashion after labeling them.
Look at the cute scre driver organizer on the bottom wall-shelf, right side! They are in order! How?!
Those drawer bins on the middle wall shelf? It will fall on your face dumping all, specially with the sharp and pointy parts looking for soft spots in your eyes.
If they're anything like me, they cleaned it up to take the pictures, there's a bunch of junk hiding just off camera, and it will be messy very quickly after! But perhaps they're just that rare breed who actually are just normally this tidy!
> Since there were so many comments about how clean the bench is, I just wanted to leave this here to show how it normally looks when I am working on it.
The biggest difference is that an improperly soldered leaded joint looks very obviously wrong, whereas a good lead-free joint can be pretty much indistinguishable from a bad one.
If you are just starting out - and will therefore by definition have a poor iron, cheap solder, and poor technique - leaded is definitely the way to go. Once your first spool of leaded runs out, it is probably time to switch to lead-free.
The "shiny" aspect is the only way an improperly soldered joint can look the same on lead-free, and as a lead dev on an open-source hardware project that attracts a lot of people new to soldering, I have never ever seen a non-shiny leaded solder joint that wasn't horrendously bad in many other ways.
When a joint is bad, you get obviously poor wetting and weird mushroom shapes, but even so a newbie will not really notice that even using leaded solder.
If you are starting out, and you have a poor iron, cheap solder, and poor technique, you have already made two grave mistakes. We always urge people starting out to shell out in the $50 range for something that won't actively make them suffer, and they do just fine with SAC305.
I often mix up the shininess of leaded solder with the shininess of tacly flux under a ring-lit microscope. Can be hard for me to know if the joint is complete or partly made of goo.
The cloudy diffuse look of lead-free SAC305 is more distinctive to my eye.
I learned from the start on lead-free RoHS solder (doing SMT work) and had zero issues with it. Honestly I've never tried leaded solder as I just use lead-free all the time, though I know people who swear by it.
Under good conditions lead-free solder works fine, but the difference in melting point really starts to hurt when you're working on large belly-pad ICs. The intended rework procedure for that kind of part involves several minutes of hot air from above and below, which is more patience than I have when I'm prototyping.
When I take production (lead-free) hardware off the line for dev work, the first step to removing a large part is to flood it with leaded solder to reduce the melting point.
Has there ever been an occupational study of lead levels among hardware engineers? I'd be interested to see it.
I really love my Hakko FR-830 hot air preheater for lead-free rework.
Took some effort with rollers to be able to pan/rotate the board while it's on the heater but does make lead-free feel like leaded for me (on dense but relatively small boards anyway.)
I find "SMD Sample Books" to be a more effective storage/retrieval system for SMD passives than the lidded parts enclosures. I've got some of the latter, but stopped using them for passives (and repurposed them for small 3-6 pin commonly used parts).
But I have to admit that that setup is far cleaner and more organized overall than my disaster of a workbench...
For prototype/repair/rework parts, we use cheap folders with business card or CD/DVD inserts at work - Cheap and effective!
The labels reflect the location of the item in the folder (Folder x Page y) and also the shelf in Storage (Rack-Bay-Shelf-Place), if it's a part we use also in production.
$625?! I'm not saying it's not worth that, for the ... 510 values, 100 of each, but who's this advice for?
To a newcomer, just get some common values, and perhaps not even 100 of them. Then you find out which ones you use most, or a slightly less common value you're missing but use/want, and restock those.
To anyone else, you know what you do, what you use, get that - I'm not sure there's any point in generic advice.
One thing I would add is that having a solid bench with a replaceable surface to do dirty/cutting things on is really useful.
I have a really solid desk I made out of scaffolding planks and recycled roof timbers. The surface is then made using either Ikea bamboo chopping boards (they were on offer) or some other replaceable work top.
Another thing that might be useful for Beginners +1 is a second hand bench top multimeter. This is only useful if you are not going to be mobile. They have the advantage that they are always there, and aren't moved much. If you have a more fancy o-scope, this isn't probably needed as you can do most things on that (once you've learnt how to.)
This is personal preference, so do take this as a personal opinion.
Analog scopes are still a thing, especially when compared with cheap digital ones that often distort things or flatly don't show them. If one has only 150 bucks to allocate for a scope, unless the digital scope added functions (math, storage, etc) are needed, the best choice is often an used analog one. Digital scopes start to become interesting when they go up in features and price, 12/14 bit ADCs, much higher s/r, high res screens, etc.
I recommend them, they're great. When I got mine, it seemed like a bit of a luxury, but now it seems like essential equipment. Also, I recommend getting a rotary cutter (link to illustrate the tool type -- not a recommendation for that particular instance) to go along with it.
I'm sure they're the kind of thing that can bw ludicrously expensive, in part because they sound complicated/high-tech. Note that they can be really cheap, as in sub-£10 for A4 maybe even A3.
I just mean don't do much (or any) cutting thinking 'I should get one of those at some point' before getting one, as excuses for new tools/toys go that's a good & also cheap one!
As someone who runs an University electronics lab I'd recommend to instead get on or more silicone mats (they come with slots for small parts and such). They withstand heat better (curtting mats can deform permanently when heated wrongly), prooved to be more durable and are very easy to clean.
If you need a cutting mat for actual precision cutting of paper, get one and treat it carefully.
Bench meters generally have higher precision that handheld units. For voltage and current that doesn't always add much value but this is particularly useful on the Ohmmeter where you can track down shorts by small changes in resistance that can't be detected with a low precision device.
24 inches (60 cm) is not deep enough, IMO. It's incredibly irritating that IKEA stopped selling reasonably priced 75+ cm deep bench tops (except for in a few markets, like Germany, maybe IKEA thinks they still use CRTs there?).
Also: I see that your photos include a proper solder fume extractor, but the BOM doesn't. I think it makes sense to include one.
I did some research a few months ago for a suitable model available in the EU. My research ended up with this one: Weller ZERO SMOG EL KIT 1. About 700 EUR + VAT. (Didn't pull the trigger yet - curious about thoughts on this one.)
I have about 40 linear feet of bench space in my garage. Its cheaper to make durable benches out of 4'x8' sheets of 3/4" plywood with another 3/4" sheet of mdf underneath. I cut them to 3'x8' sheets and use the extra 1' as a shelf. You need the 3' bench space for equipment.
Ikea used to make things out of real wood but they haven't in years. Anything other than actual plywood will sag.
I cut 48x96 sheets into 48x32 benchtops, I find that ideal. Deep enough to hold a lot but shallow enough to still reach the shelves.
Use Gorilla glue to laminate a piece of thin (1/4" or 3/8") ply to a piece of rigid pink foam board, with another piece of thin ply on the bottom. This foam-core sandwich is stiff but lightweight, acoustically dead, and very cheap. You can use a ton of random objects or just a vacuum-bag to apply the lamination pressure. Stick some one-by on the edge and radius it with a router, and you're done.
What works surprisingly well are ordinary folding tables from Staples/OfficeMax, bolted together with brackets for stability. You can create a workbench of any desired shape, size, and depth that way. Once you keep them from swaying side-to-side by fastening them together, the effective load capacity goes way up. Best of all you don't have to feel bad about drilling into them.
Trouble is, I don't think they sell anything but the plastic ones now. Working with anything more ESD-sensitive than 6L6s is a bad idea with those.
That series has a corner piece which is very deep. I got rid of it in all an international move, but I made a workbench with two of those desks one wall, a corner piece and then one more desk on the adjacent wall. It was nice to have enough space for keeping multiple projects out and felt deep enough in the corner for a PC and monitor. I like that it's very configurable too, you can put legs instead of storage units where you want more legroom.
I also just started going through the EE lab setup from scratch after 20 years of programming. What a great little guide, and matches my experience thus far (though the author is way more organized).
I'm pretty proud of the little parts system I've made, albeit much more primitive. I use pretty exclusively Mouser at this point so I invested in a cheap barcode scanner and just keep the bags in a box since I have limited space. I have a parts database that wraps SQLite and has operations such as "inventory" (taking inventory of my existing parts, updating counts), "shipment" which is a quick way to increase counts of a new shipment of parts (I just have to scan the mouser ID and then the part quantity), and "populate" which decrements each part by one per scan as I'm populating a board.
It's one of those quick-hack-and-slash setups that is really fun to build and is just another part of the yak shaving process. Overall getting into PCB design has been a very, very fun hobby, and since I have real projects I need custom PCBs for, it's been a great supplemental skill to have.
Programmers tend to turn everything into a programming problem (guilty as charged). But I got into electronics before I got into programming and rather than spending time on parts inventory programs I would spend the time on fixing things and designing little circuits, then build them up on vero board. No software required!
Readit News
But the thing is that I never had a clear idea of how it worked; or, if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB). That condition is what I now realize as being unable to reason about the circuit at hand. As in, how would I arrive at that circuit by myself - being able to point at components and say, "this guy does this, and the other guy does this, and voila, we've dancing light".
I can name individual components and stuff, and can wave my hands and say what it does individually. The fact that I can't compose a circuit from scratch still gets me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how one can build an intuitive understanding and a mental model?
EDIT: it just occurred to me "dancing lights" are called Astable Multivibrator! We were taught this at school, after I built them. Oh, I still can remember how smug I felt!
I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do <x> for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848
I do think there'd be a lot of value in blog or youtube series of experienced circuit designers showing how they approach things, why and how they pick components etc, it's a great way to learn. The blog post that HN thread is about is really good as an example.
I've had several people recommend "The Art of Electronics" as a reference for circuits building as well, but haven't read it yet
Using it to learn circuit design (just at the schematic level, still) would take serious effort (hundreds of hours) and would be far more effective if done with a skilled instructor.
There used to be simpler, smaller books that showed a simplified design process for circuit building blocks.
Rod Elliott's website, sound-au.com, has an extensive section on "theory" at the hobbyist level[1]. If you use it, please donate to help Rod keep the site up.
1. https://sound-au.com/articles/index.htm
It's an excellent book and highly regarded for a reason. I have a pro-tip about it, though... don't feel as if you need the most recent edition. The older ones are still great and relevant, and buying it used will save you a few bucks.
"Practical Electronics for Inventors" is another good one that I found much more approachable and also more inspiring.
I think I've a PDF copy of The Art of Electronics. One day...
There are also simplified operational models of some components such as transistors and op amps.
Assembling kits is a valuable first step, in that it gets your hands working. Being a bit more confident about your construction practices helps when you later try to make your own stuff, because you don't have to wonder if something like a solder joint is working. The more you can trust that your build is modeled by your schematic, the better a chance of locating the place where it isn't. That's your failure point.
I was a physics major in college, but a year of electronics was part of our curriculum. It was taught from The Art of Electronics, first edition. We were also required to buy the National Semiconductor Linear Applications Handbook, and a book on a mainstream IC logic family, which was TTL at the time. That stuff is all available online. I was fascinated with this stuff, so I read the applications handbook from cover to cover. IC application notes are still a good thing to study.
You can take another route. There's gobs of stuff you can do with a microcontroller board and pre-made peripherals such as sensors and actuators. It won't turn you into an analog jock, but it's a legitimate design method and might suit your fancy.
If you live near a university, you can probably sit in on lectures (analog-design, analog circuits, microelectronics). There are also many videos on YouTube. (If you're not really interested in repairs, skip those as that is slightly different skillset.) One really good channel is Sam Ben Yaakov's https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov
Developing a mental model of circuits also takes practice. The practice can mean simulation or playing with an oscilloscope and components on a breadboard but you need the feedback loop: designing/tweaking the circuit, checking if the behavior matches your expectation, finding what you missed if there's something wrong. Start with simple circuits and gradually work your way up to more complex ones.
Also, I had watched some videos from Behzad Razavi.
But pick up an 80's tape recorder or amplifier that's busted and you're going to have fun learning. Start on the simplest stuff you can find and work your way up from there.
This bench really looks focused on hobby prototyping, nicely done with that in mind, and with the proper assortment of components in multiples so you can go from idea to funtional circuit directly without encountering the show-stoppers (or delayers) that can be so common otherwise.
A repair bench can be made to avoid a somewhat different set of show-stoppers, there will not only be a number of different things more useful at your fingertips, but a deep store of off-bench material and tools still accessible allowing much more powerful operation. Also taking up much more auxiliary space than any one optimized bench.
Either way you never avoid all the unforseen show-stoppers, so you need a clear location to shelve & preserve an incomplete prototype or repair/restoration project, for instance while waiting for parts, in order to fully clear the bench for other work which can then be quickly accomplished from start-to-finish.
And then there's the "production" bench for hobbyists where prototyping and repair is not so much of a consideration.
Collect 'em all.
Probably the best skill investment you can make is learning to sketch on impedance paper. It will demystify passive networks, and it's a gateway to so many other techniques like Bode plots. Eventually you won't even need the special paper most of the time. I recommend getting one printed and laminated to use with a dry-erase marker.
It's best to learn the analysis along with how to simulate it and take the measurement. The discrepancies will reveal problems with the circuit, measurement errors, and limitations of the models. Your sketches will show how it works, you'll visually see what needs to be done even before you know how to do it, and you can play with design ideas right on the sketch.
There are of course many other techniques for different situations. If you use discrete transistors, maybe learn to sketch a load line and check if a resistor is bad using a multimeter. If you do radio, learn to do impedance matching with a Smith chart.
LTSpice is useful for analog electronics. You can simulate and see all the waveforms at all the nodes. You can see what small capacitors are doing.
Edit: this is a good description https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/understa....
To be fair, I have a physics and engineering background and do really understand how these components actually work, and where this metaphor breaks down, but I still find this mental model is what I use to intuitively design circuits that work.
https://www.youtube.com/@greatscottlab
I would also recommend building your own project, and having it made at one of the Chinese fab houses. Even something as simple as replicating an Arduino will teach you A LOT.
I productized an arduino prototype by self teaching, and it’s all really not that hard once you get a grasp of the basics.
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Good discussion from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222457
This guy Moritz Klein has a YouTube channel explaining the wizardry behind analog synths:
https://youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0
I’ve watched the VCO one and it helped in my understanding but I still need to breadboard it to fully grasp it.
He has a collaboration with Erica synths that not only results in a cool euro rack synth but also provides a explanatory manual. This coupled with the YouTube videos I think will help in my understanding of circuitry.
https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/diy-kits-1/mki-x-esedu-diy-s...
(This is how I think about software too fwiw. Start trying to write something on your own, then study the technical detail after, the technical detail will have something to relate to instead of just floating abstractly away. Then try to apply it yourself again, you'll probably be excited to use it at that point.)
To be fair, that’s probably the correct first step in most cases. You might move on to tracing powers and grounds in the search for basic catastrophic faults, you might wipe IPA over the board and look for the bit that evaporates first (or if you’re fancy then an IR camera looking for suspect hot spots sinking excess current), but the first step on an unknown failure is probably always going to be a look and a sniff.
- https://m.youtube.com/c/phils94
- https://www.arstemlabs.com/arlektra-mini
That and calculus-based Physics 2 in college.
You can get a decent basic model for under $100.
When I was a teenager, I couldn’t have imagined having access to the level of hobbyist affordable equipment that exists now.
Imagine something like: "This needs to be biased a little bit more positive, here we use a precision diode, that needs a little bit of negative feedback, ..."
Math is important, but much more important (IMO) is a systemic understanding of how parts of the ciecuit influence each other and where they are (or should be) decoupled more or less.
Years later I landed on a team of makers and started to work on ambitious projects- various high power LEDs, motion control systems, etc. This is where my gap in knowledge- especially wrt high power electronics, diodes, and any chip-based component- became a real problem. So I built ambitious stuff and when it didn't work, or was flaky, I'd show it to somebody who knew electronics deeply and they'd explain whatever the next thing on my list to learn was- pull-up resistors, constant current supplies, MOSFETs to control high power devices, connecting up an SPI bus between a microcontroller and sensor, schmitt triggers, bias, etc.
I got really good at making small repros of larger projects, handing them to somebody, having them solve the basic problem, then taking the learnign from the repo and putting it into the real project.
Eventually, after doing that a lot I was able to to read Art of Electronics and got a lot more out of it. most recently I was building a custom circuit to drive a vacuum tube and had some problems, and somebody mentioned Spice. So i got LTSpice and put my circuit in, and learned just enough to have it spit out what I was seeing in real-life on my oscope. OH MY GOD, it was a revelation. The simulation produced exactly what I saw and I quickly debugged the problems. This has always been true- if I have a simulation, I can learn to intuit how things work faster than if I have to assemble them manually.
My mental model now is all about modularity- building the individual bits of a larger circuit, debugging those, then integrating them together. There are so many details in analog that you have to be aware of; if you're missing a pull-up resistor or a schmitt trigger or have too much EMI, you might get it to work 30% of the time or have to do bounce elimination in software.
Another thing to be aware of is in the past 20-30 years, a lot of discrete components gained alternatives that were chip-based and move a lot of the smarts into the chip. Sure, you can build an H-bridge from components to make a bidirectional motor driver. But that motor driver from Pololu has decades of intelligence about driving motors- and reverse polarity protection (I plug things in backwards all the time) and self-limiting (if you push too much power, it shuts down, instead of frying). I've had problems with components that could have been solved by an EE.
I don't know if I could actually design any non-trivial circuit, but then, what exactly do you need to design today? Most of the work is in identifying what your problem is, then finding the existing solutions.
I just want to add that the best way to get over starting friction is to have everything ready to go like this. IMHO it's much easier to take care of the low-hanging fruit of arranging and cleaning, than it is to have to do that and THEN work. I struggle with organization though, so I treat that as an active exercise and devote 15 minutes at a time to the chore, rewarding myself with a cup of coffee or whatever afterwards.
The only other thing I would add is boxes or large bins. Not for tools or components, but for project work, so you can put it away and work on something else when you need to.
Otherwise it ends up spread all over your desk, Jim Williams style: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mightyohm/6926143499 (which is now at the computer history museum, apparently!)
Discipline is such a struggle for me that I got rid of all of the furniture in my home office and put up a couple of Ikea Billy bookcases with long shelves that wrap around my desk in an upside-down U so that I can see everything on one wall.
Kind of like these, but with a full-size desk and $20 shelves spanning the middle, in birch:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/453667362435927208/
https://www.wayfair.com/Modway--Bixby-71-H-x-69.5-W-Standard...
Most people who saw my lab when I was in private practice would not have noticed any difference from this museum piece.
There are forums where people post pictures of their benches, but it's a lot of work to document everything and you're going to use whichever distributor has sufficiently similar items in stock at your price point and can ship to your country.
But another problem is that such pages are just really hard to maintain. In a year or two, half of the items you're liking to are going to be out of production. This is especially true for stuff like no-name test equipment, low-cost breadboards, etc. There's just no stable brand or URL to use.
I'd LOVE if all of those hobbies had a concise, illustrated guide to not only the tools I should get, but *how to organize them*. Organizing is a strength of mine on a computer, where every file fits in every folder and there's no limits of size or shape. But tell me to organize my office, and I'll end up with a perfect system that goes entirely out of whack as soon as one item is added or removed.
And, there are no burn marks on that desk or the mat, the trash bin is empty instead of full of Jolt or Rockstar cans, and those cables? Not a single knot.
The bins are labeled and the label matching items in the bins.
Those stacked containers on the right middle shelf? Never would be put back in that fashion after labeling them.
Look at the cute scre driver organizer on the bottom wall-shelf, right side! They are in order! How?!
Those drawer bins on the middle wall shelf? It will fall on your face dumping all, specially with the sharp and pointy parts looking for soft spots in your eyes.
I am calling shenanigans!
(Seriously - Good job on the write-up!)
I have the theory our desks/workbenches reflect our own mind, but I digress... :)
> Since there were so many comments about how clean the bench is, I just wanted to leave this here to show how it normally looks when I am working on it.
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Most difficulties people have in using lead-free comes from one of three things:
1. a poor soldering iron
2. bad quality solder (the cheap stuff with bad flux is bad, duh)
3. poor technique (among other things, wipe your tip just before using, not before putting it away)
I like the Chipquik SAC305 with no-clean flux and other people I've recommended it to find it no harder to work with than Sn63Pb37.
If you are just starting out - and will therefore by definition have a poor iron, cheap solder, and poor technique - leaded is definitely the way to go. Once your first spool of leaded runs out, it is probably time to switch to lead-free.
When a joint is bad, you get obviously poor wetting and weird mushroom shapes, but even so a newbie will not really notice that even using leaded solder.
If you are starting out, and you have a poor iron, cheap solder, and poor technique, you have already made two grave mistakes. We always urge people starting out to shell out in the $50 range for something that won't actively make them suffer, and they do just fine with SAC305.
The cloudy diffuse look of lead-free SAC305 is more distinctive to my eye.
When I take production (lead-free) hardware off the line for dev work, the first step to removing a large part is to flood it with leaded solder to reduce the melting point.
Has there ever been an occupational study of lead levels among hardware engineers? I'd be interested to see it.
Took some effort with rollers to be able to pan/rotate the board while it's on the heater but does make lead-free feel like leaded for me (on dense but relatively small boards anyway.)
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But I have to admit that that setup is far cleaner and more organized overall than my disaster of a workbench...
The labels reflect the location of the item in the folder (Folder x Page y) and also the shelf in Storage (Rack-Bay-Shelf-Place), if it's a part we use also in production.
https://i.imgur.com/awt8HMw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/xVguVGn.jpg
Buying SMD box kits that are already populated is worth the cost. Like this.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/analog-technologi...
To a newcomer, just get some common values, and perhaps not even 100 of them. Then you find out which ones you use most, or a slightly less common value you're missing but use/want, and restock those.
To anyone else, you know what you do, what you use, get that - I'm not sure there's any point in generic advice.
One thing I would add is that having a solid bench with a replaceable surface to do dirty/cutting things on is really useful.
I have a really solid desk I made out of scaffolding planks and recycled roof timbers. The surface is then made using either Ikea bamboo chopping boards (they were on offer) or some other replaceable work top.
Another thing that might be useful for Beginners +1 is a second hand bench top multimeter. This is only useful if you are not going to be mobile. They have the advantage that they are always there, and aren't moved much. If you have a more fancy o-scope, this isn't probably needed as you can do most things on that (once you've learnt how to.)
This is personal preference, so do take this as a personal opinion.
An oscilloscope is fantastically useful, but it is not a precision tool. Calibration is just OK, and most use 8-bit converters.
https://www.amazon.com/Olfa-Deluxe-Handle-Rotary-Cutter/dp/B...
I just mean don't do much (or any) cutting thinking 'I should get one of those at some point' before getting one, as excuses for new tools/toys go that's a good & also cheap one!
If you need a cutting mat for actual precision cutting of paper, get one and treat it carefully.
Also: I see that your photos include a proper solder fume extractor, but the BOM doesn't. I think it makes sense to include one.
I did some research a few months ago for a suitable model available in the EU. My research ended up with this one: Weller ZERO SMOG EL KIT 1. About 700 EUR + VAT. (Didn't pull the trigger yet - curious about thoughts on this one.)
Ikea used to make things out of real wood but they haven't in years. Anything other than actual plywood will sag.
Use Gorilla glue to laminate a piece of thin (1/4" or 3/8") ply to a piece of rigid pink foam board, with another piece of thin ply on the bottom. This foam-core sandwich is stiff but lightweight, acoustically dead, and very cheap. You can use a ton of random objects or just a vacuum-bag to apply the lamination pressure. Stick some one-by on the edge and radius it with a router, and you're done.
Trouble is, I don't think they sell anything but the plastic ones now. Working with anything more ESD-sensitive than 6L6s is a bad idea with those.
I'm pretty proud of the little parts system I've made, albeit much more primitive. I use pretty exclusively Mouser at this point so I invested in a cheap barcode scanner and just keep the bags in a box since I have limited space. I have a parts database that wraps SQLite and has operations such as "inventory" (taking inventory of my existing parts, updating counts), "shipment" which is a quick way to increase counts of a new shipment of parts (I just have to scan the mouser ID and then the part quantity), and "populate" which decrements each part by one per scan as I'm populating a board.
It's one of those quick-hack-and-slash setups that is really fun to build and is just another part of the yak shaving process. Overall getting into PCB design has been a very, very fun hobby, and since I have real projects I need custom PCBs for, it's been a great supplemental skill to have.
Cool article!