Electronics All-in-One For Dummies

Doug Lowe

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781119822110
• eBook ISBN: 9781119822134
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Open up a world of electronic possibilities with the easiest "how-to" guide available today

If you're looking for a new hobby that's tons of fun—and practical to boot—electronics might be right up your alley. And getting started has never been easier!

In Electronics All-in-One For Dummies, you'll find a plethora of helpful information, from tinkering with basic electronic components to more advanced subjects like working with digital electronics and Arduino microprocessors.

Whether you're just getting started and trying to learn the difference between a circuit board and a breadboard, or you've got a handle on the fundamentals and are looking to get to the next level of electronics mastery, this book has the tools, techniques, and step-by-step guides you need to achieve your goals—and have a blast doing it! You'll learn:

• Critical safety tips and strategies to keep yourself and your environment protected while you work
• Useful schematics for everyday devices you can put to work immediately, like animated holiday lights and animatronic prop controllers
• How to work with alternating current, direct current, analog, digital, and car electronics, as well as Raspberry Pi technologies

Perfect for anyone who's ever looked at a circuit board and thought to themselves, "I wonder how that works?", Electronics All-in-One For Dummies is your go-to guide to getting a grip on some of the coolest electronic technologies on the market.

Book 1

Getting Started with Electronics

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Welcome to Electronics
   1. What Is Electricity?
   2. But Really, What Is Electricity?
   3. What Is Electronics?
   4. What Can You Do with Electronics?
   5. Looking inside Electronic Devices
2. Chapter 2: Understanding Electricity
   1. Pondering the Wonder of Electricity
   2. Looking for Electricity
   3. Peering Inside Atoms
   4. Examining the Elements
   5. Minding Your Charges
   6. Conductors and Insulators
   7. Understanding Current
   8. Understanding Voltage
   9. Comparing Direct and Alternating Current
   10. Understanding Power
3. Chapter 3: Creating Your Mad-Scientist Lab
   1. Setting Up Your Mad-Scientist Lab
   2. Equipping Your Mad-Scientist Lab
   3. Stocking up on Basic Electronic Components
   4. One Last Thing
4. Chapter 4: Staying Safe
   1. Facing the Realities of Electrical Dangers
   2. Other Ways to Stay Safe
   3. Keeping Safety Equipment on Hand
   4. Protecting Your Stuff from Static Discharges
5. Chapter 5: Reading Schematic Diagrams
   1. Introducing a Simple Schematic Diagram
   2. Laying Out a Circuit
   3. To Connect or Not to Connect
   4. Looking at Commonly Used Symbols
   5. Simplifying Ground and Power Connections
   6. Labeling Components in a Schematic Diagram
   7. Representing Integrated Circuits in a Schematic Diagram
6. Chapter 6: Building Projects
   1. Looking at the Process of Building an Electronic Project
   2. Envisioning Your Project
   3. Designing Your Circuit
   4. Prototyping Your Circuit on a Solderless Breadboard
   5. Constructing Your Circuit on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB)
   6. Finding an Enclosure for Your Circuit
7. Chapter 7: The Secrets of Successful Soldering
   1. Understanding How Solder Works
   2. Procuring What You Need to Solder
   3. Preparing to Solder
   4. Soldering a Solid Solder Joint
   5. Checking Your Work
   6. Desoldering
8. Chapter 8: Measuring Circuits with a Multimeter
   1. Looking at Multimeters
   2. What a Multimeter Measures
   3. Using Your Multimeter
9. Chapter 9: Catching Waves with an Oscilloscope
   1. Understanding Oscilloscopes
   2. Examining Waveforms
   3. Calibrating an Oscilloscope
   4. Displaying Signals

Chapter 1

Welcome to Electronics

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding electricity

Defining the difference between electrical and electronic circuits

Perusing the most common uses for electronics

Looking at a typical electronic circuit board

I thought it would be fun to start this book with a story, so please bear with me. In January of 1880, Thomas Edison filed a patent for a new type of device that created light by passing an electric current through a carbon-coated filament contained in a sealed glass tube. In other words, Edison invented the light bulb. (Students of history will tell you that Edison didn’t really invent the light bulb; he just improved on previous ideas. But that’s not the point of the story.)

Edison’s light bulb patent was approved, but he still had a lot of work to do before he could begin manufacturing a commercially viable light bulb. The biggest problem with his design was that the lamps dimmed the more you used them. This was because when the carbon-coated filament inside the bulb got hot, it shed little particles of carbon, which stuck to the inside of the glass. These particles resulted in a black coating on the inside of the bulb, which obstructed the light.

Edison and his team of engineers tried desperately to discover a way to prevent this shedding of carbon. One day, someone on his team noticed that the black carbon came off of just one end of the filament, not both ends. The team thought that maybe some type of electric charge was coming out of the filament. To test this theory, they introduced a third wire into the lamp to see if it could catch some of this electric charge.

It did. They soon discovered that an electric current flowed from the heated filament to this third wire, and that the hotter the filament got, the more electric current flowed. This discovery, which came to be known as the Edison Effect, marks the beginning of technology known as electronics. The device, which Edison patented on November 15, 1883, is the world’s first electronic device.

When Edison patented his device in 1883, he had no idea what it would lead to. Now, nearly 140 years later, it’s hard to imagine a world without electronics. Electronic devices are everywhere. There are more television sets in the United States than there are people. No one uses film to take pictures anymore; cameras have become electronic devices. And you rarely see a teenager anymore without headphones in their ears.

Without electronics, life would be very different.

Have you ever wondered what makes these electronic devices tick? In this chapter, I lay some important groundwork that will help the rest of this book make sense. I examine the bits and pieces that make up the most common types of electronic devices, and take a look at the basic concept that underlies all of electronics: electricity.

I promise I won’t bore you too much with tedious or complicated physics concepts, but I must warn you from the start: In order to learn how electronics works at a level that will let you begin to design and build your own electronic devices, you need to have at least a basic idea of what electricity is. Not just what it does, but what it actually is. So put on your thinking cap and get started.

What Is Electricity?

Before you can understand even the simplest concepts of electronics, you must first understand what electricity is. After all, the whole purpose of electronics is to get electricity to do useful and interesting things.

The concept of electricity is both familiar and mysterious. We all know what electricity is or at least have a rough idea based on practical experience. In particular, consider these points:

• We are very familiar with the electricity that flows through wires like water flows through a pipe. That electricity comes from power plants that burn coal, catch the wind, absorb sunlight, or harness nuclear reactions. It travels from the power plants to our houses in big cables hung high in the air or buried in the ground. Once it gets to our houses, it travels through wires through the walls until it gets to ele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Book 1: Getting Started with Electronics
• Book 2: Working with Basic Electronic Components
• Book 3: Working with Integrated Circuits
• Book 4: Beyond Direct Current
• Book 5: Doing Digital Electronics
• Book 6: Working with Arduino Microprocessors
• Book 7: Working with Raspberry Pi
• Book 8: Special Effects
• Index
• About the Author
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement