I have spiraling out of control and I have so much to do and not enough time.. I have been working to learn electronics for a while and I can't seem to remember anything or understand anything past the basics .It's extremely frustrating and about to give up my education on electronics and I keep letting my other work go to the waste side cause of electronics which gets me nowhere .. I know I still want to repair tv's and other stuff to make some extra money and most of my electronics tools I can use on my offroad trucks and cars but the rest will have to go I guess ... Oh here is the kicker I got a E-mail stating I got a Rigol DS1054Z scope coming for contest I entered WTF .. I am not sure what to do and I am losing my mind trying to figure it out and looking for some guidance if possible ..


Thanks
Jay Sr

 

Don't give up. Things are usually the most confusing just before you Grok the big picture. Electronics and EM in general is not intuitive in the beginning. You do have a huge amount of information but the mental keys to access that in a orderly way have not been created yet. If you need to take a break that's OK but my suggestion is to restart with the most basic information about charge, potential and energy before jumping directly back into circuits. This information gives the basis of electronics that allows you to breakdown each component into what it does with those basic properties.

 

Don't give up. Things are usually the most confusing just before you Grok the big picture. Electronics and EM in general is not intuitive in the beginning. You do have a huge amount of information but the mental keys to access that in a orderly way have not been created yet. If you need to take a break that's OK but my suggestion is to restart with the most basic information about charge, potential and energy before jumping directly back into circuits. This information gives the basis of electronics that allows you to breakdown each component into what it does with those basic properties.

I agree.
Sometimes when you try to hard it just doesn't work. What helped me was to just accept all the theory as true and move on to circuits knowing only what I needed to know to make it work. Then search for the answer if it doesn't.

No decision is a decision.

 

Saying the same thing as nsaspook in a different way: Schematics are a language which can be compared to musical education or verbal/written languages. You absorb a LOT before you start making your own sentences, melodies, or circuits. I worked as fumbling amateur for 6 years, then a repairman for another 4 years, before the light bulb in my head went on. That's 10 years without touching a circuit that somebody else didn't design. When the light bulb went on, I went from a QC tech to an analog designer, overnight, and I'm talking about cashing the paychecks!

Have you invested 10 years @Dr.killjoy ?

I disagree with fixing TV's for money. That industry died a long time ago. (Three days ago, I bought some carpet for my bathroom, in the building where Chester's Electronics went out of business in Largo, Florida.) I have made my way through life with electronics as my, "ace in the hole". Nearly everything runs on electricity in one way or another. Whatever job became available, I elbowed my way past the people that couldn't understand electricity. A carpenter or a plumber can't use their skills to:

build a three state Laser Repair Depot for Spectra Physics and break even in 90 days,
teach themselves how to read an engine scanner to fix a car,
learn how to install TV antennas in one week,
write their own programs in Basic or Fortran after one semester of each,
understand enough to repair air conditioners in less than a week,
assemble oscilloscope kits for the BSEE's at General Motors,
walk into a power supply mfg company, understand their entire product line, and take the top engineering position in the company in a week,
earn a workbench position diagnosing and repairing Satellite radios for nuclear submarines in 2 days, or
tell the instructor at the local tech school how the electronic shift valves in automatic transmissions work the first time they see the schematic,
but I did.

Electronics knowledge is a tool. I have a lovely tool box. I don't see how you can go wrong keeping your fingers in the electronics pie. It's a really big pie!

 

Thanks for help and will more later since I am on the road driving tonight..

 

Oh I supposedly won the scope on TEquipment.net with their write a review contest and some how I won a scope from it ... I called and they said it was legit and please them my info to get the scope out but we will have to see what happens ..

 

over 90 percent of the "fixing" you will ever do to anything is just LOOKING at it first.
knowing a little of that there 'lectrical stuff might come in handy when you need to replace a part and you will be the only guy around who knows what its called and where to get it.

 

If you haven't been using a scope up until now, you will probably find yourself understanding a lot of things more quickly with a scope on your bench.

 

over 90 percent of the "fixing" you will ever do to anything is just LOOKING at it first.
knowing a little of that there 'lectrical stuff might come in handy when you need to replace a part and you will be the only guy around who knows what its called and where to get it.

True but I get called in on the 10%. Knowing the 10% or sometimes the 1% means you are the guy who can surf the net all day or work on cool side projects because you are the guy they trust to to make decisions that can cost or save the (or your) company far in excess of your yearly salary. Your responsibility is to make decisions based on facts that if you screw-up others can see you used the best information possible at the time and what to look out for next time.

 

but you didn't START there did you?

It takes us many many years of experience to be able to slide into the mix and poke around a bit and come up with the fix that eluded all those other less experienced hands. Lots and lots of learning is just part of the mix. I have had engineers bring me a board and tell me to remove and install these parts, because they cannot perform the exacting hand soldering tasks. Experience is at least as important to the overall field as any amount of learning out of books, and no one is master of all of it. Look at how varied our members here are and in which fields they can claim expert status and in others neophyte...

 

As other have said, you are teaching your brain a new language. It takes time to form the connections and associations. Perhaps you are frustrated because you expect that you should have a higher level of understanding than what you do. Don't worry, the understanding will come. Just believe and be patient.

 

but you didn't START there did you?

It takes us many many years of experience to be able to slide into the mix and poke around a bit and come up with the fix that eluded all those other less experienced hands. Lots and lots of learning is just part of the mix. I have had engineers bring me a board and tell me to remove and install these parts, because they cannot perform the exacting hand soldering tasks. Experience is at least as important to the overall field as any amount of learning out of books, and no one is master of all of it. Look at how varied our members here are and in which fields they can claim expert status and in others neophyte...

Yes, experience is invaluable. Experience plus the level of knowledge needed to read books on subjects you lack expertise and to easily integrate that information into your experience is priceless. I agree with you, being a master at one subject means you are leaning more and more about less and less. Top level expertise on all subjects is just impossible today, there is just too much to learn in one lifetime and still have a life.

 

If you haven't been using a scope up until now, you will probably find yourself understanding a lot of things more quickly with a scope on your bench.

Yes... and speaking as the ignoramus noobie-and-a-half that I am (as compared to the rest of you guys in this celestial place) I can tell you that an entire universe opened up to me when I finally bought my first scope and actually looked at what was happening in my clumsy designs... Just be very careful when choosing the right probe for the right voltage level... I've already had to pay dearly for a stupid mistake that I made when I tried to measure a 120 VAC waveform with the wrong probe... one of the two channels of my cheap-o brand usb-scope (read: Hantek) is playing the harp in heaven today... along with one usb bus of my laptop... I was very lucky that the rest of my laptop, and half of my scope, survived.
The second watershed moment in my learning process happened when I learned (in a very basic way) to use LTspice... it's saved me a humongous amount of time. An I have @ronv to thank for that, among other people in this place.

 

op level expertise on all subjects is just impossible today

that reminds me of the adagio: "An expert is someone who knows more and more, about less and less... until he ends up knowing everything about nothing"