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circuits

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circuits

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Hi,

I am new to electronics and I am finding it very hard to keep motivated when I am struggling to remember all the rules. I read and read, and I am finding that it is hard to remember what I have read. I live in Melbourne Australia and I have just started a correspondance coarse on basic electronics. It really gets me down, electronics has alway interested me, but I always get bogged down and don't seam to finish anything. Is there anyone that I can talk to please help me!

Kind Regards

Circuits
 
Hi, i'm new as well, and i too have found it hard to keep motivated.
I 1st started reading electronics about a year ago, got bogged down in all the rules and gave up for about 6 months before recently starting again with renewed energy.
My experience is that on a 2nd reading after a little cross referencing i find the theory easier to understand and i make progress.
I think it is easy to be daunted by the amount of information there is to learn, and i dream about the day i can see a problem, and instantly design a professional solution using electroincs.
Have you built any simple circuits yourself yet? I recently made a simple light alarm following a simple schematic in a 'electronics for dummys' book and seeing it work inspires me to learn more.
My experience learning is that it helps to focus on whats necessary to understand whats going on. for example my textbook has loads of pages on transistors, and different configurations of transistors that do things like mirror currents and compare signals etc but later you find out operational amplifiers do all these things and all u need to do is buy an IC for 50pence.
Other things that keep me interested are reading problems and solutions on this site, the responses of the masters on here inspire me to one day be so knowledgable.
Also i get an electronics magazine monthly and when it gets delivered i seem to get lost in electronics.
 
Just learning pure theory is a rough way to learn. Lab and projects make it so much more fun and interesting. I learned a lot more from building projects, because after the smoke clears... you need to go through and figure out why, and what you need to avoid it. A lot of times there is no smoke trail, and you need to break out the test equipment, try and figure why you aren't getting the desired results. But mostly, you can't beat the feeling of flipping the switch the first time, and everything works just fine.
 
The only way to learn something is BACKWARDS.
The first thing you do is build lots of projects. From this you will understand component values, building blocks and how the "blocks" are put together. Then you can get a multimeter and take some measurements.
Finally you can try to see why a project doesn't work.
This is the end of the first step.
Now you can go and read-up about things.
I have seen this approach in practice. I have sold over 100,000 kits and many of the kits were sold to 10 -12 year old boys who built a kit a week and gained enormous experience simply though construction. It's the fastest, easiest and most pleasurable way to attack the "learning-curve."
See <snip: spam> to see what I mean about building circuits, and learning how they work. It explains in full detail how each circuit works.

<mod edit: self promotion deleted. If you have content to share, please post directly to ETO. Do not link to your own personal website>
 
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Hi Confounded

Thankyou for the response. It makes me a little more settled about the problems I am going through, that someone else is the same as me. I just lack a lot of confidents, I want to be able to understand thing to a high standard.

I have been trying to study for over twenty years. I only have a what they call a junior certificate in Australia for education standards and fell that I am always behind the eight ball.

I hope that you are having better luck. You are more than welcome to email me at michael.j.a@live.com.au.

Kind regards

Michael.
 
Hi Circuits,

Rules shmules.
When i was learning electrics they didn't even know which way it goes along a wire.
I was more interested in making stuff, and doing stuff, than which way it goes.
Capacitors used to be called condensers, i think very small values were sometimes called capacitors.
Frequencies used to be quoted in cycles per second or metres, now its all in Hertz.

The principles dont change. A good grounding in the basics will see you a long way.

As for the learning, i've always found the practical and the theory go best hand in
hand. Physically making some bits do a little job, seems to lodge the theory of it
into the mind.

Best of luck with it,
John :)
 
When I first went into TV servicing, my boss had absolutley no idea of theory and yet he fixed TV's to 15 years.
 
Like I tell all my first trimester students, don't get discouraged, you're learning a whole new language. Ohms, Volts, Capacitance, etc...We do a lot of hands on and that seems to help them "see" what they are learning..
 
Hi,

I am new to electronics and I am finding it very hard to keep motivated when I am struggling to remember all the rules. I read and read, and I am finding that it is hard to remember what I have read ...

You need to figure out how you learn best. I think most technically oriented people (like most of us here) absorb things faster and more permanently working with their hands, rather than just reading. When you do this, there is a mystery, or problem to solve, which triggers the brain to take the issue seriously. Personally, I can read something and forget it within minutes, but I remember all the details of real problems I've worked on decades ago.

Definitely, it's good to do hands on work as others are suggesting. However, sometimes it is difficult to find the time to do enough projects to learn everything you want. So that's where working on exercises/homework helps. I find that solving problems on paper can trigger the same memory retention as hands on circuit building, because I'm writing equations and diagrams with my hands, and trying to figure out a solution. And, the combination of hands on work with theory verification is very effective. Using circuit simulators like SPICE also seems to have the same effect.

Another trick, when you do need to just read information, is to rewrite all if the important information and draw diagrams, almost as if you wanted to write a book for someone else to learn from. This is a little time consuming, but not too bad if you can type fast in a word processor. Not only will you absorb the information very well, but you then have a handy reference book that is better than any book you can buy, because you made it the way you want. This last trick I just figured out in the last couple of years working on very complex engineering problems outside my areas of expertise (I'm 45 years old now). I wish I figured this out back in college.

The above is not necessarily easy, but a little discipline and a little love of what you are doing goes a long way!
 
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The difference between electronics and any other field of study this: Electronics pulls you up immediately. If you make a mistake or leave out a component, the circuit will not work. If you make a mistake in building, it may take a tornado or 100 years to find the mistake.
In electronics you cannot "see" what is wrong. You have to "see" via the circuit diagram and that's what makes it so unique.
That's why electronics personnel are not "registered."
That's why real estate agents changed from "estate agents" to real estate agents, because they were selling bogus land and land that was underwater.
You can be the worst solicitor or prosecutor in the world and never win a case and still be in business. But you won’t get very far if your project does not work.
I help other with court cases and they all ask me if I am a barrister. Of course I am not but I haven’t lost a case yet.

Electronics is one of the most complex fields of all. Even the simplest thing like a coil of wire has enormously complex properties when driven by an alternating voltage.
You could spend your whole life discussing the properties of an inductor.
Not to mention all the other components.
So, don’t expect to know more than 0.5% of the subject of electronics. Just concentrate on a specific area that will return you an income. That’s what I did and made a fortune.
And there is still an enormous scope of new ideas. Especially in the medical field.
But I really think it’s 90% application and 10% theory, when starting off. You really have to build project after project. If you saw the thousands of projects I have built, you will see why it’s essential to carry out construction.
It’s the only way to really find out how a circuit works and how to modify it.
 
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