thinking of exploring digital electronics

[[email protected]]

hi all

i recently had the chance to program a microcontroller, and i was
really fascinated by the idea that there's a whole computer inside that
tiny chip. now i'm thinking i might start fiddling with digital
electronics and see if i want to take that up as a hobby. for the
moment i have a couple of questions about it:

1) is one kind of current (ac or dc) more prevalent in digital
electronics? and more importantly
2) what's the best way to get started? which books should i read?
should i get one of those kits where the component pins are attached to
clamps and you make temporary circuits by attaching wires to the
clamps? are instructional breadboarding kits available? what about
those build-your-own-whatever kits - are they useful?

any help will be much appreciated

peace,
stm

 

[John Fields]

hi all

i recently had the chance to program a microcontroller, and i was
really fascinated by the idea that there's a whole computer inside that
tiny chip. now i'm thinking i might start fiddling with digital
electronics and see if i want to take that up as a hobby. for the
moment i have a couple of questions about it:

1) is one kind of current (ac or dc) more prevalent in digital
electronics? and more importantly
2) what's the best way to get started?

---
Start at the beginning.

Try to learn the physics, and if you get confused and have
questions, ask us for help. There are world-class intellects here
who will bend over backwards to help you.
---

which books should i read?

---
I like McGraw-Hill's "Outline Series". YMMV.

They're concise to a fault, so some of the intermediate material you
need might be missing, but for the bucks they can't be beat.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot...

You might want to check out "The Art of Electronics"

and, if you're really serious, the ATT Handbook.

I think it's called something like: "Reference data for Engineers,
blah, blah, blah"

Google for it with "ATT handbook"

--

should i get one of those kits where the component pins are attached to
clamps and you make temporary circuits by attaching wires to the
clamps?

 

[David L. Jones]

hi all

i recently had the chance to program a microcontroller, and i was
really fascinated by the idea that there's a whole computer inside that
tiny chip. now i'm thinking i might start fiddling with digital
electronics and see if i want to take that up as a hobby. for the
moment i have a couple of questions about it:

1) is one kind of current (ac or dc) more prevalent in digital
electronics? and more importantly

A more complex question than it appears!
An easy explaination is to think of digital as "switched DC", i.e. it
switches between say 5VDC and 0VDC.

2) what's the best way to get started? which books should i read?
should i get one of those kits where the component pins are attached to
clamps and you make temporary circuits by attaching wires to the
clamps? are instructional breadboarding kits available? what about
those build-your-own-whatever kits - are they useful?

Yes, those Tandy/RadioShack 300-in-1 kits are an excellent
introduction. Many top electronics designers started on those kits.
The best way to learn electronics is to build stuff and experiment,
learn the simple building block circuits first. *Don't* start with
transistor or semiconductor theory, it will just confuse things and
you'll think it's all too hard.
Even if you don't quite understand how the basic building blocks work,
that's ok for now. Learn all about ohms law, basic AC and DC theory,
and then all the digital gates (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR) and digital
building blocks like Flip-Flops, counters, decoders etc.

Books are great, but can get too too technical (and boring), be
careful.

For starters you could do a lot worse than Colin Mitchell's Digital
Electronics book:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/te_interactive_index.html

I'm sure there are plenty of online digital courses too.

Dave

 

[Rich Webb]

hi all

i recently had the chance to program a microcontroller, and i was
really fascinated by the idea that there's a whole computer inside that
tiny chip. now i'm thinking i might start fiddling with digital
electronics and see if i want to take that up as a hobby. for the
moment i have a couple of questions about it:

1) is one kind of current (ac or dc) more prevalent in digital
electronics? and more importantly

DC. Was 5 VDC, moved to 3.3, now going below that.

2) what's the best way to get started? which books should i read?
should i get one of those kits where the component pins are attached to
clamps and you make temporary circuits by attaching wires to the
clamps? are instructional breadboarding kits available? what about
those build-your-own-whatever kits - are they useful?

You can still get "grab bags" of assorted TTL chips from places like
Jameco (watch for line wrap)
<http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/st...toreId=10001&catalogId=10001&productId=135280>
Might be worthwhile getting one, a breadboard, and a small bench power
supply to fiddle with.

http://www.web-tronics.com/00addcreposu.html is a possible power supply.
It's handy to have one with user-settable current limiting to avoid
letting the magic smoke out of too many chips. You could certainly do a
"roll your own" supply with a 9 volt battery, a 7805 regulator, and a
few caps, though.

A breadboard like one of these
http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/catalogs/c254/P270.pdf will let you
experiment with various hookups.

If you don't have ready access to an o'scope and/or a logic analyzer you
can do a lot with an inexpensive logic probe:
<http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/st...toreId=10001&catalogId=10001&productId=149930>

The "TTL Cookbook" mentioned at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor-transistor_logic is still a
classic in the field.

Eventually you'll probably want to move to hardware description
languages like VHDL, Verilog, others, instead of relying on discrete
gates. You might consider downloading the free HDL tools from Xilinx or
Altera that let you "hook up" virtual circuits and trace the results in
their simulator. Nothing like starting out learning to straighten pins,
though ...

 

[David L. Jones]

A more complex question than it appears!
An easy explaination is to think of digital as "switched DC", i.e. it
switches between say 5VDC and 0VDC.


Yes, those Tandy/RadioShack 300-in-1 kits are an excellent
introduction. Many top electronics designers started on those kits.
The best way to learn electronics is to build stuff and experiment,
learn the simple building block circuits first. *Don't* start with
transistor or semiconductor theory, it will just confuse things and
you'll think it's all too hard.
Even if you don't quite understand how the basic building blocks work,
that's ok for now. Learn all about ohms law, basic AC and DC theory,
and then all the digital gates (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR) and digital
building blocks like Flip-Flops, counters, decoders etc.

Books are great, but can get too too technical (and boring), be
careful.

For starters you could do a lot worse than Colin Mitchell's Digital
Electronics book:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/te_interactive_index.html

Here are some sample pages from the book:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/kits/pdf/DER1.pdf

If you like it you can order the book here:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com.au/shop/product_info.php?cPath=40&products_id=35

Dave

 

[Vey]

Learn analog first.
Digital will come in time.
If you don't follow the logical path, things will get very confusing and
you will have huge, gaping holes in your knowledge.

 

[[email protected]]

i couldn't google up any "att handbook" but i put a hold on the public
library's copy of "art of electronics". thanks all around for the
input.

peace

 

[Ben Jackson]

i recently had the chance to program a microcontroller,

If you're mainly interested in microcontrollers, pick a development
board (off the top of my head one with great bang for the buck is
the Atmel AVR Butterfly -- only $20). Get something with integrated
buttons and LEDs so you can stick to the programming part you're
comfortable with. When you want to branch out, most of those boards
have spare IOs you can hook to your own creations. Check out
piclist.com (though I would have to recommend newcomers strongly
consider AVR instead, since it's easier to get a free C development
environment going for AVR).

 

[Rikard Bosnjakovic]

For starters you could do a lot worse than Colin Mitchell's Digital
Electronics book:
http://www.talkingelectronics.com/te_interactive_index.html

Not necessarily dived into digital electronics, but I can highly recommend
this URL:

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/

 

[Charles Schuler]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0028018532/002-1424524-4740854?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance