#1099 How I learned electronics

In 1975, I told my scout leader I was interested in Electronics, he gave me a 1974 Signetics Digital Linear MOS Data Data Book (One of the most beautiful Data books of it's time). I carried that book everywhere and taught myself digital electronics design. That Signetics Data Book was the start of a long career in electronics engineering . I'm now 60 and retired, but still have that Signetics data book in my library.

60 years ago I started electronics with the "just let's do it" philosophy. That led to a fun and rewarding 47 year career as an electronics engineer.

I was a Computer Engineering major in college. The thing I liked best about my EE classes was the total lack of memorization. It was all about developing certain ways of thinking about things and processes for analyzing them.

I can still remember what made me fall in love with electronics as a kid. Looking through the holes in the wooden fibre board on the back of a twin cassette tape with record player on the top. Seeing all the components on brown pcb and thinking it looks like a mini city hidden in darkness. Good Times

Curiosity is what makes you achieve this, not your degree. Congratulation, Sir.

This video explains my outlook on life/learning very well. The older I have got the more I have realized you can learn anything just by putting your genuine attention and curiosity into it. You said "you don't worry about the stuff until you need it then become an expert on it". I learned programming as a high schooler just from wanting to create stuff and I became good enough at it to secure a full time job in it. 3 years ago I purchased a corvette and now I am a pretty great mechanic just out of interest and necessity. You just have to go into stuff with the mindset of "I can do this" and you'll get there. I'm painting my car next week lol I've never painted a car before and most people will tell me that it's gonna turn out bad if I don't spend $5000 but you just gotta not listen to that and go for it. I'll just keep this outlook for the rest of my life because I love the freedom it gives me

I have an EE degree, and what you learn in school, is mostly theory, on how circuits work. Very little is taught on circuit design itself. Some in digital electronics, but less in analog circuitry. Most of what I learned is self taught. As far a math goes, in engineering school, they do go into the derivations. But what's really important, is the concepts behind the math. Knowing the math concepts can often help you design a simpler circuit. For example, the "sampling theory", which is the SAME as side band modulation, mathematically. Lots of harmonics generated, but if generate a perfect square wave (exact 50% duty cycle), you'll see that all the even harmonics disappear. Only odd harmonics. One of my old bosses, used this to create a simple tape erase system, that REQUIRED a sine wave. He just used a simple flip-flop stage, that made a perfect 50% square wave, that he fed directly in the erase head, as the inductor, and a cap so it would resonate roughly near the square wave. That combine provided enough filtering to get a perfect sinewave, because the 3rd harmonic amplitude was small enough to not be worried about. The competition, used an overly complex multistage multiorder op-amp filter. Both worked the same, but our was cheaper and more reliable.

This style of video is quality. No music and it gives you a first person view of learning something that a lot of people might think is more difficult than it needs to be.

I think this is brilliant. I learned electronic circuits in the early 90’s on a polytechnical school. At the end I received a diploma and was able to calculate voltage dividers, coil hysterisys curves, ntsc and pal vectors… but I had no clou how to build things. Because we had not learned how to bring this in practise. We had no youtube back then. Just our teachers who learned their ways to us the way they had learned it from their teachers. After a few years I quit my repairjob (Most of the time I had no idea how to repair. Just switched components until I had the right component removed and replaced) and went into computersciences. That was the end of my electronics ambition. Now, after almost 30 years, I reenter the world of electronics because I’m missing the one thing in my life that really has my interest. Electronics. But instead of learning all the equations, I bought a multimeter, a power supply, an oscilloscope and a function generator and some components and started playing. Blew up a lot of things (my first led went with a real ‘bang’) and learned by doing. And I have the greatest time of my life. Sometimes I look up the math to start understanding how it is working and it all falls into place now. In stead of trying to memorizing the math, it now is more like understanding the situation and applying the math out of it. I think this video deserves way more likes and views and should be an inspiration to everyone. Thank you sir!

Enjoyed this presentation, no hype, no music, just pure down to earth chatter, many thanks even though I couldn’t grasp some of it.

“Go do” is a great philosophy for gaining understanding and wisdom. I did EE a long time ago and, for a range of reasons, the “go do” philosophy did not feature in my undergraduate learning. “go do” is what you need to do to figure out the relationship between abstraction and reality. I salute your spirit of inquiry and investigation! Really enjoyed your vid!

I love your humility. I also have a degree in physics, grad degree as well. I work as “engineer” but there are so many things I simply don’t know but hungry to learn. This video was excellent. Thank you very much.

This was a very good presentation. I'm a 3rd year General (41 year old) and I'm just getting into electronics. The presentation was very encouraging. You'd be a very good Elmer.

Wonderful Video!!! I'm a Chief Engineer (aerospace), and took the challenge to resolve reliability issues of an electronic box (simillar to a Variable Freq Drive, but converts variable frequency to a fixed frequency). With only a high school level electronics education, I embarked on this challenge 40-years later....basically my own self-study; which I learned a TON of electronics and electrical knowledge, while helping to solve the relaibility issues. Again...Excellent Video!!!

When I was in high school, learning digital clock circuits; I overheated plenty of breaboards and 555 timer/leds for using the wrong wattage/value for the current limiting resistors. I started in electronics because I want to know how things work, my parents got tired of me taking stuff apart and sent me to a tech school to learn properly. been doing electronics repair and design ever since. best guess always work.... eventually.

Absolutely solid advice, I think when we normally want to learn about any subject, we tend to get intimidated and overwhelmed by math, theory, etc.. I appreciate your simplistic approach and think your video came out great!. Thanks!

This is gold! I have been interested and active in electronics since childhood. Every learning step was complicated math and deep theory..... almost never starting with basic concepts that build intuition.

I totally agree that getting that gut feel for a circuit makes all the difference. I've been in love with circuits my whole life---I'm 61 and still get excited by a new circuit. One thing I have found useful in understanding a circuit, is to look at the limiting cases, and the mid-line case. So, for the filters of this example. The limiting case would be opening up the capacitor (low frequencies) or shorting the capacitor (high frequencies.) Midline would be where the frequencies start rolling off, or the 3 db point. That is where the gain is half, so the value where the capacitive reactance equals the parallel (or series) resistor. I have found this can give a real insight, for me anyway, on the circuits operation, or where it can go off.

"Just go do" is great advice... Prototyping circuits is a great way to learn. Your video really demonstrated your point. You were questioning the success of the video towards the end, but don't second guess yourself, it was perfect.

I like this perspective. A lot of people want to know how to get motivated to learn new things. I think your idea of just doing things is one answer. As you do things, you seem to find things that motivate you. It reminds me of the advice people give to artists: dont wait for inspiration to lead you to act. Instead, act, and let that lead you to inspiration.