Hello everyone,


I’m a new member and I’m currently learning electronics and electrical engineering fundamentals. I’m still a beginner, but I’m very interested in circuit design, Arduino projects, and understanding how electronic systems work.


I joined this forum to learn from experienced engineers and improve my knowledge over time. I’m looking forward to reading discussions and being part of the community.


Thank you for having me.

 

Welcome to AAC!

 

Yey, Thank you for your warm greeting!

 

Welcome.

You will find a lot of information via the following thread:
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/notable-threads.112008/

Bertus

 

Aww, thank you for this information..

 

Welcome to AAC!

If you wish, you can introduce yourself here:
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/who-are-you.78/

and you can request to be pinned on the world map here:
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/where-do-you-live.183130/

both are optional.

 

Hello everyone,


I’m a new member and I’m currently learning electronics and electrical engineering fundamentals. I’m still a beginner, but I’m very interested in circuit design, Arduino projects, and understanding how electronic systems work.


I joined this forum to learn from experienced engineers and improve my knowledge over time. I’m looking forward to reading discussions and being part of the community.


Thank you for having me.

Greetings and welcome!

What's your current background and experience? Are you taking classes or pursuing a degree of any kind?

What's your math background look like? Electrical engineering is very math intensive, but it can be discussed at different levels.

 

Welcome to AAC. What area of electronics is your primary focus? What do you want to learn? What, if anything, do you already know?

 

Thank you for the welcome! I'm currently exploring electronics and electrical engineering topics as a beginner and hoping to learn more through the community. I’m not pursuing an engineering degree at the moment, but I enjoy learning technical subjects and expanding my knowledge. My math background is mostly at the general level, so I'm still building my understanding of the concepts as I go.

 

Welcome to AAC. What area of electronics is your primary focus? What do you want to learn? What, if anything, do you already know?

Thank you! I'm currently focused on learning the basics of electronics, including circuits, components, and Arduino projects. I'm still a beginner, so I'm hoping to build a stronger foundation and learn from the experience of other members here.

 

You could have a look at the education section of the AAC:
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/education/

Also the educypedia has a lot of electronics subjects:
https://educypedia.org/electronics/electronicaopening.htm

Bertus

 

You could have a look at the education section of the AAC:
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/education/

Also the educypedia has a lot of electronics subjects:
https://educypedia.org/electronics/electronicaopening.htm

Bertus

Thanks a lot for the links, I really appreciate it. I’ll go through the education section and Educypedia to help build my understanding of electronics.

 

Why not start off l;ike many of us here did and build a few simple circuits and see them in action.
Obtain a typical bread board, various componants such as resistors & capacitors together with a 555 IC together with one of the many books out there using the 555. which can be the source of many, many circuits that you can see working.
Nothing like seeing a chosen subject in action

 

I'm currently exploring electronics and electrical engineering topics as a beginner

Are you taking formal classes? Or trying to learn on your own?

If you're trying to learn on your own, that can be a big task because you don't know theory and won't be able to distinguish between the good and the bad. Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad stuff on the internet.

 

there's a lot of bad stuff on the internet.

And unfortunately some of that bad stuff is now being reinforced by AI sites, since AI has knowledge but not intellectual understanding of that knowledge.

 

Thanks a lot for the links, I really appreciate it. I’ll go through the education section and Educypedia to help build my understanding of electronics.

Back in my day....

There were a lot of kits, both for making specific things and for just exploring electronics. Possibly the best known were Radio Shack's N-in-1 electronics kits (I got their 65-in-1 kit for Christmas when I was about eight).

There are still some application-specific kits around, but I think that the general educational kits are few and far between, and the ones that I have seen have fallen into this trap of form over substance, by packing parts into modules that snap together. But there are also ones that are based on plugging real components into a solderless breadboard. For someone serious about learning electronics, I lean toward the latter than the former.

While I learned a lot just playing around with circuits -- and had a lot of fun in the process -- I think my biggest gains were when I was making something for a real project that was of interest to me, be it an auxiliary electrical system for my Bronc, a code practice oscillator, a stage light dimmer and telephone ringer for the school's theatre program, a Jeopardy-style buzzer system for the Physics Bowl, or countless others. Some of these were extremely simple, while others really pushed me to the limits (or beyond) of where my knowledge and skills were at the time. It was the latter ones that were the most frustrating, the most rewarding, and the most fun.

One of the projects with an unexpected potential for learning electronics is the classic Knight Rider light bar.

Knight Rider - Original Show Intro | NBC Classics

The goal is to replicate the effect as closely as you can using a variety of methods (of which there are many -- and that's where the educational value comes in).

Most kits that you might buy (but don't, it defeats the purpose) have eight lights, but I think the original car only had six, but that later seasons had more. Also, given the way these shows are made, it would not be surprising to find a scene where KITT enters a corner with seven lights and then has eight when it exits the corner -- in fact, it might have been a Firebird going into the turn and a TransAm coming out of it. The idea being to just pick a number and go with it (and you can change your mind, and the number, later if you choose, which might make sense as you explore digital solutions).

At the heart of things is a simple LED flasher idea. Blink a single LED on and off. Again, many ways to do it, ranging from pure discrete using some transistors and capacitors, to using a 555 timer, to using digital logic, to using a microcontroller, Try as many as you can (and be willing to go back and try ones you haven't when you get to a point that it might be useful).

Then figure out how to get the LEDs to light up one after another from one end to the other. Then figure out how to get them to go back and forth. At this stage you can settle for each LED being either completely on or completely off and only one LED being on at a time. Again, try several different approaches.

Then you can start thinking of how to create the chasing effect more accurately by noting that a given light comes on quickly but then fades out slowly as the one next to it becomes the lead light. The result is that about half of the lights are on at a given time, with diminishing brightnesses, and the head passes through the tail as it bounces of each end.

So can you think of a way to get a single LED to come on quickly and then fade slowly? There are several rather clever ways to do it.

Now, finally, can you get these fading lights to chase each other? This is where things get really interesting and you can learn a lot about real systems in the real world. Some of the most obvious approaches that sound good at first blush fail miserably in light of component tolerances. This is also where you can start to appreciate the value of using programmable logic.