Need help getting back into electronics!

[solderjoint13]

First post all.

I'm a EET grad that got a job in telecom and its been over 10 years since I've really done any electronics design or circuit work. I've done some repair work and troubleshooting off and on, but nothing like what i used to do in high school and college. I'm sure like a lot of people after school, unless you keep up with electronics as a hobby or do it for work; you don't use what you learned in school day to day. The knowledge i learned from school and in my hours of spare time when i was younger is mostly gone.

I'm reaching out to the forum in hope that i could get some guidance. Any good suggestions for books and online resources to get back into electronics? I probably just need a beginning quick refresh and then get into the more general intermediate stuff. I still know the simple stuff like ohms law, how to use a DMM, oscilloscope, but all the equations and especially anything to do with semiconductors I am at a loss.

Any help would be appreciated! I started pulling my scopes, power supply, function gen, boards, and meters out of storage so I'm getting ready.

[wizard69]

Welcome aboard!

I'm in a similar boat.   Got a 2 year degree  and quickly a job in automation.   All my electronics knowledge kinda atrophied as Electronics repair quickly became an issue of yanking a model that isn't working and slapping a new one in place as fast as possible.   Said module then sits around in the shop until you realize you will never have time to spend time repairing said module.   Eventually it goes into the recycle bin as trying to send the item back to the manufacture is generally problematic.   

Sadly I've spent a couple of decades doing this so I literally feel like I'm new to electronics.    Starting in industry I could never have imagine the combination of waste and of no time.    I also laugh my ass off over the people whining about no jobs, it would be amazing to actually hire people with the required skills.

First post all.

I'm a EET grad that got a job in telecom and its been over 10 years since I've really done any electronics design or circuit work. I've done some repair work and troubleshooting off and on, but nothing like what i used to do in high school and college. I'm sure like a lot of people after school, unless you keep up with electronics as a hobby or do it for work; you don't use what you learned in school day to day. The knowledge i learned from school and in my hours of spare time when i was younger is mostly gone.

I'm reaching out to the forum in hope that i could get some guidance. Any good suggestions for books and online resources to get back into electronics? I probably just need a beginning quick refresh and then get into the more general intermediate stuff. I still know the simple stuff like ohms law, how to use a DMM, oscilloscope, but all the equations and especially anything to do with semiconductors I am at a loss.

Any help would be appreciated! I started pulling my scopes, power supply, function gen, boards, and meters out of storage so I'm getting ready.

[paulca]

The Arduino/ESP IoT eco-system is currently an interesting, easy and actually useful way to get into modern digital (and in some cases analouge) electronics.  Home Automation for example... without getting trapped in the proprietary cloud based data harvesting privacy nightmares like Alexa, EvoHome et.al.

[drussell]

Rather than trying to re-learn or refresh your knowledge in general, I suggest simply finding something you're interested in to repair, modify or build from scratch.  Find a project you want to do, something you want to work on, then you'll work out where the gaps in your knowledge are as time goes on and you work through your project(s).

You may be surprised to find how much you begin to recall once you're actually "doing something," and there are certainly people here to help refresh your memory on specifics when the need arises. 

[vk6zgo]

Rather than trying to re-learn or refresh your knowledge in general, I suggest simply finding something you're interested in to repair, modify or build from scratch.  Find a project you want to do, something you want to work on, then you'll work out where the gaps in your knowledge are as time goes on and you work through your project(s).

You may be surprised to find how much you begin to recall once you're actually "doing something," and there are certainly people here to help refresh your memory on specifics when the need arises. 

Repair is good, especially if it is something made by a reputable manufacturer, as you learn how things are done by companies who want their products to be something better than the level of grot being turned out everywhere.


Most Techs can regale you for hours with tales of EE's "howlers"!

"If you have a "clever idea", & wonder why "nobody else has thought of it", it is because they have, & discovered the pitfalls the hard way!

Bosch made some picture monitors which had two fold out PCBs .
Obviously, they needed hinges & flexible connections back to the rest of the device, so they could be operated by people doing maintenance.
Some "bright person" decided to combine the hinges & connections, which was good for a while, until the opening & closing made the contact fail!
Meanwhile, Sony used leads & plugs ------no prize for picking which one had the least failures!

Be wary of manufacturer's specs.
The very last generation of Pye TV transmitters used rectifiers in the High voltage supply which were quite small, but supposedly "adequately rated" .

They "popped like firecrackers" , so in its first year in service, we had exhausted the supply of them in Oz, & had to get a rush shipment from the UK.
NEC used big, solid, much "more than adequately rated" rectifiers which operated for decades without fuss!

By the way, if you must use "through hole" components, make the holes large enough that the part can be desoldered & replaced.

Another thing ----RF isn't very "plug n' play"!
EEs who have never worked with it try to take "short cuts", & it is usually the customer who suffers.


Sorry that this has turned into a "rant", but over many years, I have had to work around too many "stuff ups"!

[solderjoint13]

The Arduino/ESP IoT eco-system is currently an interesting, easy and actually useful way to get into modern digital (and in some cases analouge) electronics.  Home Automation for example... without getting trapped in the proprietary cloud based data harvesting privacy nightmares like Alexa, EvoHome et.al.

Back in high school we did program in pic basic and some pic micro controller that I can’t remember what it was. Arduino is something I was looking into full around with. Is there a development board you would suggest @paulca?

Rather than trying to re-learn or refresh your knowledge in general, I suggest simply finding something you're interested in to repair, modify or build from scratch.  Find a project you want to do, something you want to work on, then you'll work out where the gaps in your knowledge are as time goes on and you work through your project(s).

You may be surprised to find how much you begin to recall once you're actually "doing something," and there are certainly people here to help refresh your memory on specifics when the need arises. 

I am working on a battery tab spot welder right now, but its mainly a transformer I salvaged and I bought a pulse timer off of eBay. That idea of learning what you need to build what you need is definitely more practical and makes a lot of sense.

Repair is good, especially if it is something made by a reputable manufacturer, as you learn how things are done by companies who want their products to be something better than the level of grot being turned out everywhere.


Most Techs can regale you for hours with tales of EE's "howlers"!

"If you have a "clever idea", & wonder why "nobody else has thought of it", it is because they have, & discovered the pitfalls the hard way!

Bosch made some picture monitors which had two fold out PCBs .
Obviously, they needed hinges & flexible connections back to the rest of the device, so they could be operated by people doing maintenance.
Some "bright person" decided to combine the hinges & connections, which was good for a while, until the opening & closing made the contact fail!
Meanwhile, Sony used leads & plugs ------no prize for picking which one had the least failures!

Be wary of manufacturer's specs.
The very last generation of Pye TV transmitters used rectifiers in the High voltage supply which were quite small, but supposedly "adequately rated" .

They "popped like firecrackers" , so in its first year in service, we had exhausted the supply of them in Oz, & had to get a rush shipment from the UK.
NEC used big, solid, much "more than adequately rated" rectifiers which operated for decades without fuss!

By the way, if you must use "through hole" components, make the holes large enough that the part can be desoldered & replaced.

Another thing ----RF isn't very "plug n' play"!
EEs who have never worked with it try to take "short cuts", & it is usually the customer who suffers.


Sorry that this has turned into a "rant", but over many years, I have had to work around too many "stuff ups"!

I do off and on repair work, but for the most part I look for burned up components or something that isn’t passing voltages like it should. I’ve had some piece items that i’ve Had to hand back over and tell the person that I can’t repair it which is pretty embarrassing. I feel like if I had a refresher on my education or knew where to look when I had being doing the repair I might have been able to fix it.

I appreciate the input people and I will definitely take all your suggestions!

[rstofer]

Hobby electronics, these days, seems to use more code than wire-wrap.  Unless you want to get into hard-core analog, most of the equations are of limited utility.  They can be relearned when they come up.

Given my view about the importance of code, I recommend the Freenove Ultimate Starter Kit for Arduino which comes with an Arduino compatible board

https://www.amazon.com/Freenove-Ultimate-Compatible-Programming-Electronics/dp/B08B4D5MV5

The Freenove tutorials are VERY good and all the code is included.  Since the code is compiled with the Arduino toolchain, code can be written on Linux, Windows or MacOS.

Download the "Ultimate Starter Kit" FNK0017 from here:

http://www.freenove.com/tutorial.html

Wander through the Tutorial.pdf and see what you think.

[rstofer]

Hard core learning:

Khan Academy Electrical Engineering program
Digilent Real Analog course

Khan Academy for math as required

Desmos.com for graphing stuff
Symbolab.com for solving stuff

If you plan to do Kirchoff's Laws for more than a 3x3 matrix, you might want to look into the Home license for MATLAB or the free workalike Octave.  This is pretty aggressive stuff for a hobbyist..

Wander through Dave's videos - I particularly like the Fundamentals Fridays series.  Lots of good stuff!
Look at the w2aew videos - they are excellent and all of the theory is explained.  Plan to spend a lot of time with his videos.  You already know how to use a scope but, just in case, Alan works for Tektronix and he REALLY knows scopes.  He has a sticky at the top of the Beginners forum.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhtYYpsE3LzVUVSNHUVhfcoaI3mLEKSIx

[paulca]

Back in high school we did program in pic basic and some pic micro controller that I can’t remember what it was. Arduino is something I was looking into full around with. Is there a development board you would suggest @paulca?

Any of them really.  For Arduiino anyway.  You can go with an offical Arduino or a clone.  You can get kits with lots of basic toys to play with, like sensors and displays.

For ESP8266 Wifi MCU I currently like the Wemos Mini D1, but the Lolan boards are good too.  From AliExpress they are like $2.99 each.

The modern Arduino space (including the ESPs and more) is very accessible, although frowned on as not hard-core enough.  Also while accessible the community can be a bit dumb and most of the code is awful.

[tggzzz]

I'm a EET grad that got a job in telecom and its been over 10 years since I've really done any electronics design or circuit work. I've done some repair work and troubleshooting off and on, but nothing like what i used to do in high school and college. I'm sure like a lot of people after school, unless you keep up with electronics as a hobby or do it for work; you don't use what you learned in school day to day. The knowledge i learned from school and in my hours of spare time when i was younger is mostly gone.

I'm reaching out to the forum in hope that i could get some guidance. Any good suggestions for books and online resources to get back into electronics? I probably just need a beginning quick refresh and then get into the more general intermediate stuff. I still know the simple stuff like ohms law, how to use a DMM, oscilloscope, but all the equations and especially anything to do with semiconductors I am at a loss.

Any help would be appreciated! I started pulling my scopes, power supply, function gen, boards, and meters out of storage so I'm getting ready.

I disagree.

I returned after 20 years, and very little had changed since the early 80s.

What has changed?:

• components and equipment is smaller, faster, cheaper; only the latter is important!
• nanopower is a topic
• ADC/DAC speed and resolution
• surface mount
• cheap high quality PCBs
  
• wireless comms modules
• ebay, for high quality old test equipment (if you are careful and have patience!)

Don't be afraid of surface mount. There are many tutorials around, e.g. https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/category/homebrew-pcbs/

[solderjoint13]

I disagree.

I returned after 20 years, and very little had changed since the early 80s.

What has changed?:

• components and equipment is smaller, faster, cheaper; only the latter is important!
• nanopower is a topic
• ADC/DAC speed and resolution
• surface mount
• cheap high quality PCBs
  
• wireless comms modules
• ebay, for high quality old test equipment (if you are careful and have patience!)

Don't be afraid of surface mount. There are many tutorials around, e.g. https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/category/homebrew-pcbs/

I just meant that with the job i have I don't do any real electronics troubleshooting and building. I got so busy that I put electronics "tinkering" to the side all these years. I've forgotten a lot of my math and rules of thumb from university. I agree that not much has changed. Thanks for the link. Surface mount soldering is something I haven't really touched.

Any of them really.  For Arduiino anyway.  You can go with an offical Arduino or a clone.  You can get kits with lots of basic toys to play with, like sensors and displays.

For ESP8266 Wifi MCU I currently like the Wemos Mini D1, but the Lolan boards are good too.  From AliExpress they are like $2.99 each.

The modern Arduino space (including the ESPs and more) is very accessible, although frowned on as not hard-core enough.  Also while accessible the community can be a bit dumb and most of the code is awful.

oh nice! I honetly had no idea that MCU boards were going this cheap. I don't need anything hardcore right now. Just something to get my feet wet again. Thanks

[james_s]

Back in high school we did program in pic basic and some pic micro controller that I can’t remember what it was. Arduino is something I was looking into full around with. Is there a development board you would suggest @paulca?

Any of them really.  For Arduiino anyway.  You can go with an offical Arduino or a clone.  You can get kits with lots of basic toys to play with, like sensors and displays.

It took me a long time to warm up to the Arduino but I've eventually come to like it quite a lot. It has plenty of warts, no argument there, however it is easily the most accessible, it is SO simple to get something up and running and while the quality varies there are ready to use drivers for just about any random widget you can order from China. Displays, sensors, DACs, ADCs, there is a ton of different stuff out there and getting almost any of it to do something is dead simple.
For ESP8266 Wifi MCU I currently like the Wemos Mini D1, but the Lolan boards are good too.  From AliExpress they are like $2.99 each.

The modern Arduino space (including the ESPs and more) is very accessible, although frowned on as not hard-core enough.  Also while accessible the community can be a bit dumb and most of the code is awful.

[paulca]

oh nice! I honetly had no idea that MCU boards were going this cheap. I don't need anything hardcore right now. Just something to get my feet wet again. Thanks

Yea and they just plug in to the USB port and the IDE is a single free download.

You can of course make it more complicated later and building a barebones ATmega circuit on a breadboard is an nice beginner achievement/goal.

[bsodmike]

Quick tip, checkout https://platformio.org/

It has a lot of the tooling already setup and one aspect I like about it is that I can run the same "wire" code on an ESP8226, and with relatively little work, run it on an Arduino.

I prefer working in Vim/CLI and you have total freedom doing that, or firing up VSCode and using that works just as well.

[Kjelt]

I'm reaching out to the forum in hope that i could get some guidance. Any good suggestions for books and online resources to get back into electronics? I probably just need a beginning quick refresh and then get into the more general intermediate stuff. I still know the simple stuff like ohms law, how to use a DMM, oscilloscope, but all the equations and especially anything to do with semiconductors I am at a loss.
Any help would be appreciated! I started pulling my scopes, power supply, function gen, boards, and meters out of storage so I'm getting ready.

I would really think twice if this is what you really want. If so go for it.
But if you haven't spent any personal time the last ten years on the hobby it probably is not that interesting for you, but you woukd like to do it 40hrs a week now?

In my country Only 10-20% (my guess) of EEs end up in a EE related hardware job.
 Most go commercial or in subfields like embedded programming which is where I ended up since there are little hardware jobs left. Also little knowledge you gained in the formal training is actually used in the job, most is practical know how often very domain specific where the company products are involved. A lot is simulated nowadays so knowledge of those software packages is sometimes more important than knowing some formula.
Just my two cents, it won't be easy for you to get back without some sponsor, a friend who already works in the field and can help you get a job.