I'm a 62 yr. old newbie trying to teach myself electronics. I'm pretty good about picking stuff up just by reading about it. I've been online and read a lot of tutorials about general electronics theory and many articles about individual items. And they all explain things pretty much the same way. They tell me all about what each item is made of, P material, N material, carbon, etc. They tell me how it's made. They explain about electrons & holes. You know what? I don't care. I don't want to build one. I'm going to buy it ready made. I just want to know what it's supposed to do and how to wire it up. I'm an electrician, and when I learned the trade, they didn't try to teach us all the different materials a receptacle or switch or a relay was made of, or how it was put together. They taught us what is was for and how to wire it to make it do its job safely. Does anybody really think about if there are enough holes for electrons to fall into when they are designing a circuit??
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why I need to know what things are made of or how they are manufactured. I need to know its specs and how it should be wired. That is what I would term as 'basic electronics'. Does anybody know of any place that gets down to brass tacks and leaves the engineering crap out? Or tell me if I'm missing the big picture.

 

It is not harder than it needs to be, it is just hard. If it was easy, then everybody would be doing it. Now that you know what to look for and avoid you can pick and choose your online materials more carefully. Maybe the electronic textbook associated with this site has something to your liking.

Try here:
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chpt-1/from-electric-to-electronic/
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/digital/chpt-3/digital-signals-gates/
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/tex...roduction-to-discrete-semiconductor-circuits/

 

I was 63 when I picked up the hobby. My advice: Do something instead of just reading about it. In other words, find something you want to do that involves electronics and get started doing it. My first project was to build a variable speed, 3 HP, 12V winch to launch model sailplanes. That led to lots of interesting things to learn.

John

 

Welcome to the forum Sparkie78. I know exactly what you are saying. I don't have a good answer for you. I have worked in electronics all my teenage and adult life. I still build a lot of projects in electronics. The specfications of a lot of parts affect their operation, of course one is temperature, another is voltage and of course current. I still generally don't care about whats in an integrated circuit, I just care about what the output with be with a input. I have a number of books that give circuits for various devices. Many of them don't worry about the structure of
components. I'll be happy to help you any way I can.

 

Some people are really OCD. They want to know every little thing at the sub-atomic level. Then they find this level of knowledge has no practical purpose unless/until they are on the cutting edge of Research and Development, several years later. Some people know the math and follow instructions. I call them newgrads. They can do brilliant work but don't have any wisdom. These are the kind of people that solder a relay to carry 3 amps into a circuit board, and when things start to age, the relay un-solders itself. There must be a middle ground.

You don't have to know everything about everything, but you do have to consider several properties of any circuit. I can design an op-amp to have a gain of two volts output for each one volt of input. That isn't even half the story. Next, I have to see if the op-amp can track at the frequency I want, if it can supply the current the next stage needs, if it will overheat, if the next stage is going to send reactive pulses at it and fry the output stage, if the input has a signal clean of interference from higher or lower frequencies, how much the accuracy will be affected by the Input Offset Voltage and Current, which brings us to input impedance and the size (ohms) of the resistors. If I have 6 stages in a row, what will each stage be outputting right after I turn the power switch on? Do I need a delayed start-up? Do I need to guarantee a reset every time it starts? Will it throw a glitch when the power goes off?

You don't have to know everything, but you have to know what's important. That alone is enough to keep one busy. So, yeah, it isn't easy or everybody would be doing it. I just gave you a list of things more likely to be important that the difference between a metal film resistor and a carbon film resistor. Knowing what's important is part of the job.

 

Welcome to AAC!

If you want to learn about electronics you couldn't have found a better or nicer place.
Yes, you are missing the big picture.

What is electronics?
Electronics is a merger and culmination of many science and engineering disciplines that include physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering.

"... leaves the engineering crap out"

No way man. You are mixing up science and engineering. Discussing "electrons and holes" is the science part of electronics, what we call solid-state physics. That is the theory behind electronics. What you are after is the practical part of electronics, the engineering, the get-your-hands-dirty part.

You can spend four years or more in college learning electronics and even then you might not be good at building anything.

You don't have to learn everything. Take the part you're comfortable with. Start by building circuits. Get a solderless breadboard strip, a battery, some LEDs and a bunch of resistors. Make a string of LEDs light up (without blowing any!).

Get a 555-timer chip and make the LED flash.

Electronics can be a lot of fun and very rewarding. Don't let the "electrons and holes" hold you back.
Eventually you will get to the point where you move on beyond mastering Ohm's Law (which is 99% what you need to know).

AAC is bursting with educational material under the EDUCATION tab.
Or you can jump straight into the Experiments section.

Or begin with playing with LEDs and 555-timer circuits.

The best part about AAC is that you are a member of a large international group of enthusiasts who are more than delighted to answer your questions and solve you problems, 24/7, guaranteed.

Again, welcome to AAC!

 

There is the big picture and then there is zooming in. I agree with you somewhat since I went to school to learn electronics and the main focus was the fundamentals. Mostly math, some hands on electronics. However the fundamental approach kind off clouded the big picture (at least for me) I got so hung up on voltages and currents that the logic of the circuits became very hard to focus on. Heck! how transistors work was a bit hard for me to visualize because of the fixation on the math.

My method to combine the "two" was doing a quite a bit of breadboarding at home(even though it was mostly ready made schematics) Tweaking them and making measurements in the leisure of my free time made so much difference.

But the zooming in is very much needed if you want to reach a higher understanding of the material.

Good luck in your studies.

 

Doh! cursed be my slow typing...

 

My thanks to everybody that replied, I appreciate the understanding and willingness to help.
papabravo, I knew it was going to be hard, but it seemed like I wasn't learning the things I wanted to learn. Kinda like I had taken the wrong exit and was heading somewhere that I didn't want to go. And mrchips, you are right. I am looking for the 'get your hands dirty' part. I have a knack for being able to take something apart that I know little or nothing about, figure out how it works and fix the problem, If I can't figure out how it works, usually a few minutes on the internet will do the trick. Either way, when you figure something out, you have that 'ah-ha' moment, when everything falls neatly into place. A nice feeling. I haven't had that yet studying electronics. Maybe some small ones. I think I need to have more patience, maybe I was expecting too much too soon. And I think building some simple projects and taking actual meter readings rather than just reading about it is a very good idea.
I will definitely check out those learning links.
Thanks again

 

I'm a 62 yr. old newbie trying to teach myself electronics. I'm pretty good about picking stuff up just by reading about it. I've been online and read a lot of tutorials about general electronics theory and many articles about individual items. And they all explain things pretty much the same way. They tell me all about what each item is made of, P material, N material, carbon, etc. They tell me how it's made. They explain about electrons & holes. You know what? I don't care. I don't want to build one. I'm going to buy it ready made. I just want to know what it's supposed to do and how to wire it up. I'm an electrician, and when I learned the trade, they didn't try to teach us all the different materials a receptacle or switch or a relay was made of, or how it was put together. They taught us what is was for and how to wire it to make it do its job safely. Does anybody really think about if there are enough holes for electrons to fall into when they are designing a circuit??
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why I need to know what things are made of or how they are manufactured. I need to know its specs and how it should be wired. That is what I would term as 'basic electronics'. Does anybody know of any place that gets down to brass tacks and leaves the engineering crap out? Or tell me if I'm missing the big picture.

It is only as hard as you imagine it to be. Yes, you need to start applying what you learn. Less "engineering" and more "hands-on doing". What is it you would like to build first? Personally, I would start with power supplies. Stuff you will need to power future projects.

 

I'm a black box kind of guy myself.
For example, there have been several long arguments on some of these sites about whether a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is really current operated or voltage operated, and the discussion goes on and on about what the actual physics of the device is.
That's all a hill of beans to me.
From a practical, black-box point-of-view, a BJT is best thought of as a current controlled device for large signal, switching, and biasing design, and as a voltage controlled device for small signal (AC) design.
That pretty well covers it for anyone designing with the device.

 

And I think building some simple projects and taking actual meter readings rather than just reading about it is a very good idea.

There is an amazing degree to which doing it makes the connections in your brain start working.
Once upon a time, a newgrad came here to ask how to find the collector on a transistor.
What? You can math circles around me and you never met a transistor in person?
I just can't see how that works.

It seems there are a lot of things too trivial to teach in a class, but the lack of them makes the mystery worse. After you burn up a few 10 cent transistors and finally get some to work, you will have a dozen new skills that seem to have sorted themselves out. That sorting and categorizing has moved into long term memory. The tiny details no longer get in the way. You stop thinking about which leg is the collector and why you need a resistor. Your mind starts working on a higher level. Theory and practice help each other grow.

 

Good Luck

 

Electronics is easy, learning English after being born and raised in Texas is hard.
I'm a believer in the full brain theory. As we get older our brains are so full of facts, mental pictures and set sequences of thought patterns it become difficult to integrate new information into that swamp for easy access. So keep reading about general electronics theory with a completely open mind, eventually it will integrate with existing knowledge and I think you will be pleasantly shocked how much easier it becomes.
http://wnep.com/2014/08/07/full-brain-theory/
https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0230/paper0230.pdf

 

I'm a 62 yr. old newbie trying to teach myself electronics. I'm pretty good about picking stuff up just by reading about it. I've been online and read a lot of tutorials about general electronics theory and many articles about individual items. And they all explain things pretty much the same way. They tell me all about what each item is made of, P material, N material, carbon, etc. They tell me how it's made. They explain about electrons & holes. You know what? I don't care. I don't want to build one. I'm going to buy it ready made. I just want to know what it's supposed to do and how to wire it up. I'm an electrician, and when I learned the trade, they didn't try to teach us all the different materials a receptacle or switch or a relay was made of, or how it was put together. They taught us what is was for and how to wire it to make it do its job safely. Does anybody really think about if there are enough holes for electrons to fall into when they are designing a circuit??
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why I need to know what things are made of or how they are manufactured. I need to know its specs and how it should be wired. That is what I would term as 'basic electronics'. Does anybody know of any place that gets down to brass tacks and leaves the engineering crap out? Or tell me if I'm missing the big picture.

For almost all practical purposes you don't need to know what's going on inside a device. I agree that many electronic courses and tutorials are unnecessarily daunting when all you want to do is implement the devices not make your own and actually, the understanding of what goes on inside a device tends to follow later once you have have a solid practical understanding of what the device does. Sometimes it's useful to know what goes on inside devices especially when things don't work or the application is unusual but for the most part I think of them as black boxes with input and outputs.

I always think this deep-theory first approach is like a really bad first driving lesson where rather than starting by getting familiar with the vehicle's controls and practicing driving, the instructor begins by explaining in fine detail (including the maths) how the engine, clutch, transmission, windscreen wiper, brakes, tyres etc. work. If this were the approach most people wouldn't make it past the first lesson.

 

I was in the same position you are a few years ago. I basically knew nothing but had a project I wanted to complete (a digital scoreboard). I started with very simple projects (light an LED) then gradually got more complicated and eventually got a working knowledge of some basic electronics. The people on this website were a HUGE help. Whenever I ran into a roadblock, I'd post my problem and these fine folks always helped me solve it. Now I can whip up a circuit pretty quickly. So I would recommend what others have: dive in and try to make a simple circuit. You will be amazed at how fast you climb the learning curve and will soon be doing some complicated circuits.

 

s.
I always think this deep-theory first approach is like a really bad first driving lesson where rather than starting by getting familiar with the vehicle's controls and practicing driving, the instructor begins by explaining in fine detail (including the maths) how the engine, clutch, transmission, windscreen wiper, brakes, tyres etc. work. If this were the approach most people wouldn't make it past the first lesson.

While I generally agree, having a lets just start driving or building electronics can create a very poor mental image of what's happening inside the black-boxes that can lead to a low plateau of learning about the subject that keeps them stuck only on the current aspect of a problem. Good drivers and builders are thinking several steps ahead of what's currently happening because they know a little bit here and a little bit there results in a smooth turn or result in the end. Complex circuits and systems are about interactions so when we black-box too much we miss how they aren't truly independent of each other. You don't need basic energy and matter knowledge to practice electronics but you do need it to build a proper understanding of electronics.

What's needed for basic electronics is not that hard: http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/14173.pdf
http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/

 

You don't need basic energy and matter knowledge to practice electronics but you do need it to build a proper understanding of electronics.

No one would argue with that. I just wanted to make a distinction between deep-theory i.e. what's going on at the electron level and the invaluable practical theory and maths we use most of the time for designing circuits.

 

No one would argue with that. I just wanted to make a distinction between deep-theory i.e. what's going on at the electron level and the invaluable practical theory and maths we use most of the time for designing circuits.

It's been my experience the people that think they understand electronics at the electron level are often the most confused about practical electrical science. I'm a proponent of a more qualitative fields based approach to electronics and electricity in the beginning before the quantitative practical theory and maths sections. This plants the proper foundation for later advanced subjects in electronics where the simplifications of circuit theory start to fail and poor mental models like water flows lead you off the correct path.

 

I'm a 62 yr. old newbie trying to teach myself electronics. I'm pretty good about picking stuff up just by reading about it. I've been online and read a lot of tutorials about general electronics theory and many articles about individual items. And they all explain things pretty much the same way. They tell me all about what each item is made of, P material, N material, carbon, etc. They tell me how it's made. They explain about electrons & holes. You know what? I don't care. I don't want to build one. I'm going to buy it ready made. I just want to know what it's supposed to do and how to wire it up. I'm an electrician, and when I learned the trade, they didn't try to teach us all the different materials a receptacle or switch or a relay was made of, or how it was put together. They taught us what is was for and how to wire it to make it do its job safely. Does anybody really think about if there are enough holes for electrons to fall into when they are designing a circuit??
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why I need to know what things are made of or how they are manufactured. I need to know its specs and how it should be wired. That is what I would term as 'basic electronics'. Does anybody know of any place that gets down to brass tacks and leaves the engineering crap out? Or tell me if I'm missing the big picture.

You are missing the big picture -- and you are missing the distinction between an "engineer" and a "technician", though those terms are both too broad and have significant overlap to be applied too cavalierly. But you are right in that, up to a certain level, you don't need to know the details of how something works in order wire it up according to the directions supplied by someone that does know how it works. And, yes, people really do think about holes and electrons when they design circuits -- I spent many years designing custom ASICs and that was a significant part of designing our imagers and readout ICs so that they would actually work. But there are plenty of circuits that don't need that level of knowledge in order to design them to meet a desired level of performance.