Hey. I am looking for some good online (ideally free) labs and explanations that will teach practical use of semiconductor devices and design. In the past, I have taken basic AC/DC,transient,etc analysis classes at school, and now I am going through MIT 6.002x on edX in order to refresh some of that knowledge. However, I have the same problem I did in school, which is that I really have very, very little exposure to using basic semiconductor devices (transistors, mosfets, op amps, etc) and basic circuit design techniques. Most of my schooling was based around digital logic and microcontroller programming, and when it comes to actually interfacing devices with micro controllers or any sort of analog design I am almost clueless.
I am wondering if there are any good online classes/resources which teach practical electronics applications and include labs. I recently picked up an older 4 ch 100mhz analog scope, frequency counter, and multimeter. I would love to be able to use these things with experiments and learning. I found an example of a class like I am talking about at MIT, but of course the full course is not available online.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-091-hands-on-introduction-to-electrical-engineering-lab-skills-january-iap-2008/I would really like to get some practical skills and knowledge to give me ideas about how to do some simple analog design and interfacing things with microcontrollers that have higher voltage/current requirements.
For example, I have an idea for a project that involves ringing an old telephone bell (40-90 VAC), and ideally I would like to have a low-voltage power source for the project and somehow approximate the ring signal as it is very low current. I am thinking there has to be a way to do this because something like a taser operates on a 9v and creates 10k+ volts.
Thanks for your help