Wow! Talking Electronics is a great site!

[FenderBender]

I  finished watching Dave's interview with Colin Mitchell a few days ago. At first I went to his site; It looked okay but totally 1999, so I glanced around a bit and then forgot about it. Today, I took a look again and WOW. I may still be a beginner at 17 years old, but I'm certain the information on there is valid for people on all stages of their electronics journey.

For example, since we all seem to be power supply crazed these days, including myself, Colin's got an amazing section on all of the principles of power supply design right there. All the information you would ever need. I'd be surprised if you'd ever have to ask a question about power supplies again after reading through that.

And not only power supplies of course, everything from LED circuits to microcontrollers to transistors. Holy hell the transistor section is wonderful also. Perhaps I seem a bit enthusiastic here but I am so thankful for this site. Sooo much valuable information written in clear English. (Sorry if you don't speak English), but needless to say, it's incredible.

I think if someone wants to be kind enough to help him redo his site a bit, not that I'm opposed to the site, it would help him and the electronics community a ton. It actually works well. But to foreigners to the site, they might disregard it because it doesn't look like it belongs in 2012. It's so much better than 90% of the crap circuit sites these days, who just repost each-others circuits and the descriptions suck and makes you more confused than learned.

Thank you Collin!

http://www.talkingelectronics.com/te_interactive_index.html

[Mint.]

I completely agree with you, the knowledge on the site is an absolute goldmine, but the experience is slightly altered by the fact that the website layout is so old.

I think if someone wants to be kind enough to help him redo his site a bit

Agreed!

[EEVblog]

Yea, the amount of info on his site is absolutely incredible.
Take for example just the transistor stuff:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/200TrCcts/1-100TransistorCircuits.pdf
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/200TrCcts/200TrCcts.html
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/200TrCcts/200TrCctsFrontice.html

And every one of his books and magazine are available as a free PDF download, as it everything on the site, you just have to find it!

The PIC course:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/html/PIC-Page01.html
Testing components:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/Testing%20Electronic%20Components/TestingComponentsFrontice.html

and that's just the tip of iceberg.
Dare I say there is not another electronics site on the internet with more educational stuff.

Most things are accessible from:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/te_interactive_index.html
with links down the left side bar

Dave.

[ChrisW]

WOnderfull website, I'm ordering the CD.

-Chris

[Galenbo]

... It looked okay but totally 1999, so I glanced around a bit and then forgot about it....

...I think if someone wants to be kind enough to help him redo his site a bit, not that I'm opposed to the site, it would help him... 

...But to foreigners to the site, they might disregard it because it doesn't look like it belongs in 2012...

I hope he won't, and keeps it in the 1999 look.
Making it web 2.0 compliant would attract the consumerist arduinoLed and IphoneApp wave too much, witch certainly will ignite a very known effect.

[Bored@Work]

Making a site modern doesn't help. EDN just relaunched (Chris got a hard one over this ...) a very modern site. But like with the last relaunch they messed up their archive, thousands of links gone. And that doesn't just affect links from other sides, but internal links, too. Articles are suddenly without the accompanying images, references to other articles and to PDF versions of the articles are dead, etc.

Oh, and their web designer had no clue. Count the number of header lines until you start to get to the contents.

[siliconmix]

excellent resource.

[photovore]

Thank you for the heads up. I definately see myself spending a few hours( or days..) reading through this website.

[T4P]

Extremely good resource ( Time to recommend it to my friend  )

[StubbornGreek]

I'd stumbled across the site a few times but never realized what a gem of a resource it really is. Excuse me while I ignore my work and get lost there for a while... 

[Spawn]

I quote myself from the original post:

Don’t forget to visit Colin Mitchell’s webpage: www.talkingelectronics.com
He has really nice old school projects and a lot information for everyone in to electronics. Put it in to your bookmarks, believe me you will need it one day.

And to be honest I like the old school looking site, it might need some fixes here and there but other than that the style is just great specially after seeing Dave’s interview with him. It just reflects how he is, keeping simple but offering tremendous information which you can’t find anywhere all together. 

[FenderBender]

Let me say this. I don't mind the way the site is. Actually it works quite well and it's very snappy because its not bloated. The scrolling side panel actually works. Fine, keep it Web 1.0. That's fine. But, its still a  little sloppy and navigation could be better and possibly a little better organized. We don't want a fancy site, because as people have said, then you making the transition to electronics-for-dummies....However, just for some continuity, I think a little bit of a fix-up could do it some good.

Like simple things. The site seems to be oriented for 4:3 monitors. A centered style that would work with widescreens would be one. Perhaps an interactive index for the articles so one can click on a section and be brought right to it. I don't know. Small things.

[MikeK]

Reminds me of a comment I saw for one of Jeri Ellsworth's videos.  He criticized the lack of editing and Jeri replied with, "I'll bend over backwards for you next time."

[FenderBender]

If this is directed at me....please. I don't even care how it looks.

[MikeK]

Nah, sorry.  I'm grumpy today.

[FenderBender]

Quite alright. Only reason I'm saying that I think the site might benefit from a slight upgrade would be to attract honest people that really want to learn about electronics. Unfortunately, no matter who we think we are, we all have judged a book by its cover and though this site is great, I think a lot of great people might miss out on it.

[EEVblog]

I agree that it definitely needs a facelift. The key of course is not to break any links, so just leave all the files where they are and simply do new home and category pages that link to that existing content nice and cleanly.

Dave.

[saturation]

Great site and interview.  The amount of work Colin had to put in on his own to get the magazine published then survive, seems to parallel the work Dave does to keep the eevblog alive too; its mostly a one man shop.  Colin reach only 14,000+ people monthly, and lasted ~ 15 issues, then there was the cash out lay, the mailing etc., such a contrast on how the Internet magnifies and simplified publishing.

In the US, Electronics was dominated by Gernsback Publishing, via Radio Electronics and cousins, and Popular Electronics, from Ziff Davis group [ who later started PCMag and others].  However, with the rise of the PC in the late 1970s, marked the slow decline and death of most electronics mags.  Likewise, the rise of the Internet led to the decline of PCMag, Computer Shopper and most notably BYTE.  They exists now as online versions, but they are a shadow of their former selves.

[EEVblog]

Great site and interview.  The amount of work Colin had to put in on his own to get the magazine published then survive, seems to parallel the work Dave does to keep the eevblog alive too; its mostly a one man shop.  Colin reach only 14,000+ people monthly, and lasted ~ 15 issues, then there was the cash out lay, the mailing etc., such a contrast on how the Internet magnifies and simplified publishing.

It is rather interesting when you think about it.
I have a bigger audience than TE had, and what the current Silicon Chip has, and have produced more "episodes".
But I still think those mags had an order of magnitude more content in them than one of my videos. But that's not surprising considering they were a months worth of work each, often by a group of people.
But yeah, anyone can now easily produce and distribute content to a wide audience.

Dave.

[vk3yedotcom]

Another State of Electronics / Colin Mitchell interview! Posted today.



I could listen to him for hours!

[I wanted a rude username]

Randomly remembered Talking Electronics' LED Zeppelin game recently. As published in Issue No 1 of the eponymous 32-page pamphlets they used to sell ... for $1.20! Ingenious design.

[EEVblog]

Another State of Electronics / Colin Mitchell interview! Posted today.



I could listen to him for hours!

W00t!
Karl has a ton of this material that's been sitting there for like 8 years now!
Glad to see it finally starting to come out.

[andy3055]

Great site! Thanks for the post.

[amyk]

Good to see that 8 years later and the site still looks the same, just with more content.

[edy]

I bought the CD a few years ago but sadly have not had the time to really delve into it. Now is a good chance to dive in some more as I've learned quite a bit since, and it may make more sense to me!