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Learning to make circuit boards
amateurhour
One day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
One day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
So after watching the totally awesome iron man I decided I want to take my computer knowledge to the next step. I'm already good on the software side, and I can build a computer and repair it like nobody's business, but I never really got into the technical aspect.
I have a soldering iron and I'm not bad with it. I can patch broken connections on my guitar or amp, make wires, etc, but I know nothing about boards or how they work.
I need some good reference material and beginner courses online or in book form so I can get started. I'm hitting up radio shack this weekend, so H/A, give me a shopping list!
I have a soldering iron and I'm not bad with it. I can patch broken connections on my guitar or amp, make wires, etc, but I know nothing about boards or how they work.
I need some good reference material and beginner courses online or in book form so I can get started. I'm hitting up radio shack this weekend, so H/A, give me a shopping list!
are YOU on the beer list?
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mind linking a few good ones?
(in my experience, you can generally trust wikipedia for non-politically charged science subjects. Who the hell is going to vandalize Ohm's Law?)
I don't know how it compares to other books, but the one my lab used this year was Electronic Circuits for the Evil Genius
We did some interesting projects out of that, and it came with the components for the projects it suggests.
Do you know anything about logic? That'll help a great deal in understanding how binary things work.
Is there anything in particular you want to learn how to do?
I'm just getting started, so basic stuff, like led lights with controllers, tones, etc. I want to start there.
I think for your purposes learning by doing would be best, so go to Radio Shack or wherever the hell actually sells this stuff and grab a breadboard and some assorted circuit components(resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc.)and a book or internet source on building circuits. I guess you need some type of signal generator, or you can get some practice manipulating the power from your wall outlet into what you want
Also basic theory is important obviously, preferably if there was a source that was like "ok now we're gonna build a voltage divider, and it works because a resistor is...." that'd be what I think is best for you, but that may not exist. If you have a basic physics textbook lying around, read the parts about circuits in it
one more edit: The breadboard, by the way, eliminates the need for soldering, so you can reuse circuit components
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board
Equipment wise, we did pretty much everything with a breadboard, at a station with all sorts of useful things- variable voltage sources, function generator, debounced pushbuttons, and a bunch more.
First semester was analog. Resistors, inductors and capacitors at first- primarily theoretical stuff. We worked out Ohm's law, did some equations to figure out what voltage would be where, made some sin waves with AC and capacitors, that sort of thing. (if you want to work with this type of think, you'll probably want a digital multimeter- it can measure voltage difference, resistance, and current within a circuit)
After that, we got into diodes and LEDs, and transistors. We worked on a couple projects with that- voltage dropper, transistor amplifier, pulse generator. The two little gadgets we took home were a light-sensitive night light (two LEDs hooked up to a light dependent resistor, a potentiometer, some regular resistors and a transistor) and an alarm circuit, which would light up an LED and start buzzing if either 1 set of wires was connected, or a second pair of wires were disconnected (this used some resistors, a capacitor, and a silicon controlled rectifier), After that we worked on OP amps, and made a basic radio.
The second semester, of course, was digital- very different. It's all logic based, once you start using transistor-transistor logic circuits; AND, OR, NOT and the like. I don't have my lab book at the moment, as it's currently being graded, but we worked out how to make the different logic gates, how to simplify circuits with Carnot maps, and got into things like 555 timers, counter circuits, 7 segment digital displays, J/K flip flops, etc. A lot of it was making a series of LEDs flash a certain series of numbers in binary, or just light up in a row. For our final project, we used J/K flip flops and whatever else (I just used one NOT gate in addition) to make a circuit to control an automatic door- it would open if you hit the switch while it was closed, close if you hit the switch while it wasn't closed, and stop moving if you interrupted an infra-red beam.
Past things like that, you'd probably have to get into micro-controllers, which we did a little on at the end of class. I'll see if I can find the site he pointed out for us, I looked like it had some good info, including free PDFs of some manuals.
Anyways, BlochWave is probably right about Art of Electronics, but it's still a quality book. I still go back to it.
I think you can view transistors as a black box for a while and just get things like NAND chips, NOT chips, a 555 timer chip, those sorts of things. The best bet is to go on eBay, go to Fry's, Radio Shack or wherever and buy a hobby electronics kit or 2. They usually contain a whole bunch of resistors, capacitors, sometimes inductors, and instructions for making silly gizmos like a circuit that lights up red and blue alternately and so on. They're not very expensive, either. My friend got a few off eBay and just spent a day building all of them. They even included a little booklet explaining the circuit.
I would get a breadboard, like BlochWave said. If you get a printed circuit board, make sure it is just a grid of holes and doesn't have and laid-out copper paths on it. Usually they're marketed as hobby boards or test boards. If it says "surface mount" don't buy it. Make sure you have batteries, a battery holder, and lots of insulated wire. All three of those should be relatively cheap. You can use grocery store cheap batteries for a lot of this stuff.
Analog circuits like filters and RLC circuits and whatever are neat, but I think those won't be terribly entertaining without a function generator and an oscilloscope(which I've seen at Fry's and I believe are pretty expensive)
If you blackbox the transistors (ie buy logic gates and op-amps and not care how they work)you can dive right into logic circuits and learn yourself some binary and get going there.
www.tonepad.com has a lot of good schematics, as well as www.diystompboxes.com
It's really fun, and it's definitely something you should try if you're into it.
That's awesome, and might be considerably cheaper in the long run then paying $60 and up per pedal.
THANKS!