Suggestions for Beginner in Electronics

[madshaman]

No time for my story ATM, but I have a tip.  Find yourself a used copy of this book:

[yashrk]

@madshaman thanx for the tip  . But can you tell what do you mean by ATM?

[22swg]

For me it was the buzzz  of making something out of  components and it worked, I had the good luck to have a wizard instructor at our companies training school, it was ancient stuff then, transistors and nixie tubes but when logic ic's started reaching the field I grabbed a few 7400 chips and  experimented. You need to make stuff , I have seen good technically educated students who knew the lot, but could not read a resistor code or were frightened of touching 12 volts !   

[madshaman]

@madshaman thanx for the tip  . But can you tell what do you mean by ATM?

At the moment.

[pickle9000]

@pickle9000 thank you for sharing the link. Well the only thing I hate about such kits is that they are like Magic tricks," Waala!!! It works"  but they don't teach you how it works or go into details like why we have to use components used in them.

The circuit descriptions in these kits are actually very good. The best thing about them is you get to see a wide variety of basic circuit's build them up. You can then change component values to see what happens. Yes it's simplistic but you said hands on with easy to follow instructions.

[yashrk]

@22swg mine teachers are the same

@pickle9000 

[electrolux]

When you build a curcit expect it NOT to work , it's murphy's law .

[yashrk]

@electrolux  "murphy's law" or "Daves Law" ?

[retrolefty]

My experience with building personal electronic stuff is if it's completely digital it almost always works from the start, however if it's all or even a little analog stuff on it, it almost never works at the start.

[yashrk]

@retrolefty it happened to me also

[yashrk]

How can we share this thread in other categories ? Really many people there would love to share their stories and advice with beginners !!

[yashrk]

Come on guys share some more stories !!!

[retrolefty]

Come on guys share some more stories !!!

OK
 A ham radio operator walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder.
The bartender asks "where did you get that"?
"Dayton of course" says the parrot.

Some might need to be a U.S. Ham to get it, sorry.

[Amra]

I started my journey by playing laser tag. 

We started with a couple world of wonder lazer tag sets (still have a new in the box set), eventually graduated to an 'electronic survivor shot' setup (my favorite), and tried many others along the way. Photon, Laser Challenge, Sega Lock-On, Laser Challenge Pro, as well as playing at the professional places that kept stats on little keyfobs.

Eventually we got into customizing our guns, by purchasing nerf guns or other gun models (video game console guns for example) and transplanting the electronics from store bought guns into the new cases. The internet was growing every day at this point, and using AOL we were able to scour the internet and found several other people with a similar interest.  Eventually we found a few really industrious people who even went so far as to build their own electronics from scratch, and they had even taken the time to give a basic explanation of how the gun worked, and how you could build a basic laser tag gun from scratch with a couple 555 timers. Later we found someone who went the extra ten miles and build their own circuit using a PIC16F84A microcontroller.  At this point, my eyes were large and glistening.

So my journey began, and I found along the way this project offered a lot of education in a very small package.  Frequency modulation, LED driving, Audio for the sound effects, microprocessors (or timers), assembly or C programming (if using micros), control systems, infrared communication, optics for increasing range/controlling spread... etc etc.

As far as beginner projects went, I picked a doozy! 

Eventually, the laser tag craze died down, and most of my collection was relegated to a few totes in the garage.  I still have them of course, and I have many custom guns, but its been a long time since I played.  With that project a great many other projects suddenly became possible and my passion for electronics was in full bloom.

Eventually I went to college and got my associates in EET.  I still have every plan to go for my bachelors, but currently I am still paying off my student loans (over half-way done).

[GreyWoolfe]

Come on guys share some more stories !!!

OK
 A ham radio operator walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder.
The bartender asks "where did you get that"?
"Dayton of course" says the parrot.

  .  Never been there but someday.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Come on guys share some more stories !!!

One day I turned on my Commodore 64, and it didn't boot up. I had to replace the 7805 regulator.

You didn't ask for interesting stories.

[yashrk]

Thanx for sharing @Amra

and @retrolefy @Alex Eisenhut    Nice one!!

[Vincent]

I didn't get into electronics as a hobby the way most did. I was actually introduced to residential electricity first when I was 5 or 6 years old. By age 14 I understood the relation between voltage, current and resistance. Indirectly I knew the Ohm's law! I was lucky enough to have a private teacher with me, one of my cousins who's 10 years older than me. He was in technical school to become an electrician, and was more than pleased to teach me the basics of electricity, using what is still today my favourite part of electricity as a whole, line power! I did zap myself quite a few times, but I was taught how someone can electrocute themself to death, so I made sure I could never GROUND myself.

It's only in the last few years that I became more interested in electronics, especially after technical school, where I had learned the basic electronic components, including the op-amp (though I'm only starting to fully understand all the little details about them!). I already have several projects I want to start when I have the time and all the tools. However I was never a huge fan of digital electronics, most of those projects involve analog electronics LOL. One of them will be about something that interested me quite a lot back in the days before the Internet arrived at home, when television systems were still NTSC. I used to read books about televisions and how they work, the raster and all that. Now that I have the Internet, and a book explaining how television systems work, I want to build my own television system, in which I would replace the cathode ray tube by a system of rotating mirror drums. It did exist back in the 1930s and was known as the "Scophony" system. My goal is to port the system to the NTSC standard.

Now that I opted for diesel mechanics as a profession, I have the basic knowledge to design the mechanical part of such a system too! The biggest challenge will be to design a mirror drum for the horizontal scan capable of operation at over 100 000 RPM    Magnetic bearings are what I have in mind, but I won't reveal too many details, that'll be for another day!

But if you're looking for beginner projects, don't think about insane projects like mine 

[Seekonk]

I was in the third grade when my school had a book fair to raise money.  I picked this nice hard bound book on electronics.  Teacher told my mother it was age inappropriate, she didn't listen.  I read a lot, there was no one to talk to.  I was always being chased out of the town dump.  A screwdriver and wire cutter let me dissect TV's there.  Had my first paying electronics job repairing transistor organs.  This was 1964 and I was 14.  My brother who was older had to drive me on service calls, that cut down on the profit.  I spent more time in bars at 15 with bands than I ever did when I reached drinking age.  I was back stage with the Cowsills, don't tell me I wasn't cool.  First amp was a couple 807's running 450V.   I think the secret was a lack of parental supervision.  A child is a sponge if it is something they are interested in.

They did an experiment in India at a remote village with no electric.  They set up a computer kiosk and just left, no instructions at all.  Keystroke activity was monitored.   It ramped up and then slowed down for a while before increasing again.   Later the researchers  asked why it slowed down.  The villagers said,  We had to stop to learn English.

[hurricanehenry]

Next was the bell labs books, I found these really useful on giving historical context, you can find out why things are now the way they are, how telecommunications and electronics evolved and the many dead ends along the way. It sounds boring, and honestly it is but its so worth it. Its like having a room full of grey beards brains in a jar. Just waiting for you to read there reports.

Another excellent set of books that are available for free online are the MIT rad lab books. Compaired to modern books these were written in a far more accessible way to my mind. The people that wrote these books knew there subject inside out and had worked on practical systems.

I found the MIT book but not the Bell Labs books. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Here are the MIT books I found:

https://www.jlab.org/ir/MITSeries.html

[eugenenine]

I started out with those radio shack kits where you bend the spring over and stick in the wire.  Those and tearing apart anything anyone would give me.
I'd get books and magazines for the local library.  In a small town the library would order anything I found interesting.
Later on in junior high school my parents subscribed to McGraw Hill's contemporary electronics series.  Every 4 months you got a three ring binder and one module then the other three months you got one more module to add to the binder.  Each module was a cassette tape, a stack of papers for the lesson and some components.  Each module would add to the first so you needed to keep all the components for the first.
Starting high school our school divided the class up between college prep, sports scholarship and the rest of us who were 'not college material' were sent to the vocational center.  I choose the electronic program there and we had a brand new teacher who decided the class wasn't going to be a swap tubes in the donated tv's and taught it like college prep class.  He told me I should at least go to DeVry.  For those outside the US, DeVry is a private for profit college which probably doesn't have the prestige of the big names but doesn't have all the BS of the big names either.
After college I ended up in an IT career and have been messing with electronics at home since.