2021-08-29 - Analog
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I'm currently picking up my old hobby of playing around with
electronics again. This time i want to do things a bit different
though. In earlier years i have always tended to quickly move
towards the binary side; boolean logic, microcontrollers, hooking
chips to other chips, i.e. only digital things.
This time i would like to focus on really improving my knowledge on
the fundamentals of electronics, and focus solely on analog
circuits. Furthermore, i would very much like to stay away from
integrated circuits completely, and only focus on discrete
components.
I think now i have a huge knowledge gap to cover in this area of
analog circuits, so i am now really starting from scratch again.
The knowledge gap - i think - has been caused by the fact that
integrated circuits and 'digital' logic, were all the hype when i
started electronics. So all the 'starter' books i owned as a kid
glanced relatively quickly over the boring components such as
resistors, capacitors and inductors; then moved quickly to using
transistors as switches, and then went on with boolean logic and
the TTL 74xx and CMOS 40xx series.
Or perhaps... maybe i glanced over the 'boring' topics rather
quickly, and moved on towards building cool things with chips ;)
Later, microcontrollers came more obtainable and before i knew it,
i was again sitting behind my computer, programming these nifty
little chips.
This time, i intend to stay away from the computer, and stay away
from integrated circuits if i can. Funnily, i notice that starter
books nowadays also do the same thing as in the past; They explain;
a resistor resists current, a transistor switches stuff, and here's
an arduino to do cool stuff with.
I would like to read a starter book focusing only on 5 components;
resistors, condensators, inductors, diodes and transistors.
Don't know if that book exists; Perhaps it is time to finally get a
copy of the book of Horrowitz and Hill. Apart from that i should
also be picking up a fresh multimeter, because the one i've had for
the last 20 years, can currently only be used as a voltmeter.
And of course, an oscilloscope... That would be very nice as well.
I used to have a PM3233 in the past; which i sold off at some point
as it took a lot of space and wasn't used a lot due to my digital
oriented hobbying. However, going analog, an oscilloscope becomes
pretty relevant equipment again all of a sudden.
