Progression and rites of passage.

[paulca]

So I know building your own power supply is a big thing and considered a rite of passage in the electronics hobby, but as I am fast tracking myself through learning this stuff, I wondered what other rites, milestones, must-dos, progressions there are.

So we are usually start with:
Batteries and LEDs.
Resistors, capacitors, diodes.
Switches.
Basic transistors.
Relays.
Basic ICs (logic gates and things that make LEDs do cool stuff).

Then the theory stuff and building block circuits kick in:
RC circuits.
Bypass caps, coupling caps.
Op amps (in various modes).
Mosfets
Voltage and current sensing.
Triggers, limiters, references, etc.

I'm assuming this is where we get to:
Linear power supplies
Dummy loads
Switching power supplies

But what next?
ADC/DAC?
Microcontrollers?
LCD Screens?
Battery chargers?
Specialist ICs (Probably required for all of the above anyway).
Arduinno?

So, can anyone add/remove/rearrange these lists to add milestones, building block circuits, etc.

Or is there a decent article/thread where this has been thrashed out before?

(For what it's worth I figured a load would proceed a power supply because without one you have little to no way to test it.  Only so many LEDs you can fit on a breadboard and... I'm not charging my phone off a power supply I built until it's very well tested!)

[tggzzz]

You list successes. That's fine, but sometimes failures and near disasters are rites of passage.

[Nitrousoxide]

I don't know about singular milestones. But block/system integration would be something good to practice, and is usually where most time is wasted in projects.

An example would be to construct a PLL, something that requires several sub-systems.

If you are sufficiently confident with analog electronics (i.e. transistor amplifiers, op amp circuits, active/passive filters). You can move on to two other commonly classified 'core subjects' which are digital signal processing and control systems.
Control systems is quite a broad topic, DSP is slightly easier to tame (FIR/IIR filters).

Either way, learning both C and (ARM/microchip/avr) assembly would be another milestone.

[EEVblog]

Stuff has to release the magic smoke, and projects must fail the first time you build them. It's the only way.

[Brumby]

You missed perhaps one of the most fundamental steps on your rite of passage... The oscillator.

You have to get involved with oscillators - several of them.

From the astable multivibrator (plus monostable and bistable) through single transistor ones to the 555 timer - and these are just for starters.


And while we cannot escape the digital world, I would encourage every opportunity to play with analogue circuitry.  Certainly, analogue solutions can be a bit more challenging than digital ones - but that's when you learn more.

Stuff has to release the magic smoke, and projects must fail the first time you build them. It's the only way.

That is an absolute given!

[Russ]

Stuff has to release the magic smoke, and projects must fail the first time you build them. It's the only way.

Sage advice. 👍

[Keicar]

You missed perhaps one of the most fundamental steps on your rite of passage... The oscillator.

Indeed. Especially the ones that were supposed to be amplifiers...

[basinstreetdesign]

You missed perhaps one of the most fundamental steps on your rite of passage... The oscillator.

Just build a couple of amplifiers - you'll probably get a free oscillator, anyway.   

... DSP is slightly easier to tame (FIR/IIR filters).

You think so?!   

[xani]

Whatever you find fun (and preferably, also challenging) doing. Fun, challenging, useful, pick at least one for your new project.

Some I decided that driving neopixel via signal gen might be interesting project. Then I decided that I don't really want to fuck around with graphical editor for it so I wrote tiny clojure program to generate right file for my sigilent, and after few tries it worked. It even made pretty "effects" when I changed the frequency of generated signal.

Was it useful ? not really altho at least now I do not need to whip up a sketch in arduino to test neopixels. But I did learn a bit of clojure and I did learn how to programmatically generate waveforms I need.

[paulca]

Thanks folks.  What made me ask is a few times now I have jumped into a project idea and made a hash of it.  When I evaluated why I made a hash of it, it was because the project contained sub circuits I just didn't quite understand, or they did something different to what I was expecting.

Take my first audio amp with an LM741 (the Sorry op amps thread).  I completely failed to grasp AC coupling.  Once that twigged properly I got it working.

In a few of those replies I was becoming paranoid you guys are watching me.  I literally watched Dave's video on using a 555 timer to generate a PWM signal to dim LEDs (for the mantis).  I literally got back out of bed and came downstairs with the thought, "Hey that's cool, I can do that!", but... it was a pulse and it had a width, the width kinda changed, but mostly the frequency changed.  I gather it would work to dim LEDs (it did dim the test one), but I wanted a better PWM.  It's only this morning I wondered what would happen if I use both 'sides' of the same potentiometer and the steering diodes to control a fixed frequency duty cycle.  I'll see later if that's a completely flop.

Sometimes it's two steps forward (or ten) and you make a hash and evaluate the reason why it doesn't work is because you missed a few steps along the way and haven't a clue what you are doing.  You might have gathered I am not the kind of person to see someone else's circuit and copy it verbatim.  I believe if I understood it I can recreated it.  If I can't recreate it, then I didn't understand it.  So I at least try on my own first and then regroup with a bit of revision back and forth to other people's circuits.  If I just copy their scematic I don't feel I have learnt anything, I'm just an assembler.

I also realised I should probably buy a book which drives a progression, like "Learning the art of electronics" and work through that.  (Again, thanks Dave for reminding me about that last night).

As to software and digital stuff.  I'm almost shying away from it as I'm a software engineer by trade, 15 years in the business.  I'm worried I could just do pretty much everything in software and every project revolve around a PI or Arduinno.

Assembler is definitely on my list as I haven't used it in decades and then it was just University stuff.  I have done low level C before, spend 3 or 4 years working in capital markets with customers grumbling about a handful of microseconds here or there.  Interesting design style I called "borrow a loop", where you never created a new loop unless you absolutely had to, you looked through the code to find someone else looping through the same structure and grafted your code in there.  All to keep latency to a minimum.

[xani]

I'd advise you first build a circuit verbatim (to level your component supplies allow), then probe the shit out of it, then start modifying things. It is much easier to grasp how circuit works if everything is not broken. I've also learned a lot by just simulating smaller parts of bigger circuit.

As for "Art of Electronics", honestly it is amazing reference even without anything extra. It is very well structured in a way that first gives you theory, then working basic examples, then refines the examples and explains the tradeoffs between designs

[BrianHG]

Stuff has to release the magic smoke, and projects must fail the first time you build them. It's the only way.

I've had quite a number of those in the past 40 years....

[paulca]

Building a computer always sounded like a good goal for way down the line.  I'm not sure I would repeat what Ben Eater did, but I have ideas of bringing a Z80 IC to life though.

[saike]

Building a superregen radio circuit, attempting to tune into something, anything,  and having your Mum put her head round the bedroom door and say "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE, THE TELLY IS GOING ALL FUNNY"   Yes!!! progress. That was a long, long time ago.

[james_s]

Building an amplifier of some sort is something I've always found to be an interesting challenge, either audio or RF. I wouldn't list too many specific projects as being a rite of passage, but rather build *something* interesting/useful/challenging from scratch. Power supplies are common since they're relatively simple and useful in future projects but they are certainly not a required or only option.