Hello Experts,

I am just a bit curious. I have planned to start making electronics projects from hobbyists' magazines and person design just to solidify my understanding of the art. But I am feeling discouraged because after making such projects would I throw them off after building them as not all are useful. What can you advise?

 

Look into only breadboarding the circuits.

 

I often canabalize experiments for later experiments and projects.

But this seems to be a case of severe premature optimization. My suggestion is just start and work out what you will do with what you build after you build it. Being discouraged by such a non-issue is a sad thing.

 

Hello Experts,

I am just a bit curious. I have planned to start making electronics projects from hobbyists' magazines and person design just to solidify my understanding of the art. But I am feeling discouraged because after making such projects would I throw them off after building them as not all are useful. What can you advise?

I figure it this way. When I was 13 (a very long time ago) I was building projects using my dad's issues of then Popular Electronics magazines. The projects are long gone but the knowledge I gained building them got me through a 40 plus year career putting beanies and weenies on a table. It's not about the material projects it's about what you take and keep for the rest of your life. Every enthusiast starts somewhere.

Ron

 

I agree with all of this. Breadboarding, particularly solderless breadboarding, let's you reuse components over and over, not to mention playing around with modifications and tweaking them to see what affects what and how to make them better. Only commit them to something more permanent if you plan to actually use it (or if you are working with circuits that do not lend themselves to solderless breadboards, like anything above a few megahertz).

I still have a couple projects I did in high school over forty years ago, but most of my projects have either been cannibalized for parts or thrown away. But the knowledge gained and enjoyment found lasts a lifetime.

 

If you want to build circuits that you can use going forward, look at building your own test equipment. It doesn't have to be fancy -- start out real simple. A circuit that has a bank of hardware-bounced switches, both momentary and toggle, a bank of DIP switches, a bank or two of LED indicators. A few LM317/337-based pot-adjustable voltage supplies, an adjustable clock generator, perhaps a few other things. You can put all of this onto one board, are treat it as a bunch of separate little circuits and build them up bit by bit. Lots of other things you can do from there.

 

In my workshop nothing gets thrown away.
One of my first construction project was a 5V 1A DC power supply. I still use it today.

 

What's your concern? The amount of e-waste generated? Or just wasted effort getting thrown away as you learn?

 

Certainly a protoype board setup will work well for some projects, others, to be usable must actually be bult. And some are of no use but only interesting, and those are simply studied for a while. But all constructions made with materials worth purchasing in the first place are kept, and used for parts as needed. No need to ever dispose of good components. Consider how difficult it is to predict a year into the future. In addition, many of us ARE NOT afflicted with more wealth than we know what to do with.

 

I never built anything permanent I didn't intend to use.

Sure, over time things fall into disuse...that's just the way it is.

And since I always put chips and transistors in sockets they can be salvaged, the rest just gets tossed, because I hate de-soldering or using project boxes with holes in them that have no switches or something else in them. (aesthetics)

Yea, there might be a few other things that get salvaged like barrier strips and such.

 

I breadboard first for a couple of reasons. First to see if it works and second to get an idea of how I will need to arrange it on a protoboard. The only things I protoboard are circuits unsuitable for all the capacitance and inductance problems that breadboards present and modules that I think I will have a use for later such as rectified and regulated power supplies and amplifiers mostly.

 

Thanks all for your contributions.