Mark's Electronics Tutorials

This is designed to be a collection of basic tutorials for the average person interested in electronics as a hobby. Throughout this tutorial I make two basic assumptions: (1) The average person knows basic algebra and (2) The average person does NOT know calculus (and probably doesn't want to learn it). Learning calculus, or at least the basics of integrals and derivatives, does make understanding electronics easier. However, calculus is not required for a basic understanding of electronics, and it is quite possible to get a good feel for what a capacitor or an inductor is doing in a circuit, even if you aren't capable of plugging through all of the math to get an exact solution.

IMPORTANT!

Before you begin, let me caution you that ELECTRICITY IS DANGEROUS! Very small amounts of electricity, under the right circumstances, can cause YOUR HEART TO STOP! This is NOT a good thing. The MOST IMPORTANT RULE IS TO KEEP YOUR HANDS IN YOUR POCKET IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Ok, enough shouting. I think you get the point. Start off playing with battery powered devices. It's hard to kill yourself with a AAA cell.

I hope you enjoy these tutorials, and find them useful. Please e-mail me with any comments, especially if you don't understand something.

  1. Your Basic Joe Average Flashlight. This covers some basic concepts about the flow of electricity, some units used in electronics (volt, amp, ohm, watt), and the concept of resistance.
  2. Power Supplies For Your Projects Batteries, AC vs. DC, and some simple AC to DC converter circuits
  3. How To Read Schematics
  4. Fun With Resistors: Parallel and series resistance, color codes, and the different types of resistors that you can buy.
  5. Circuit Analysis (a.k.a. Even More Fun With Resistors) This article introduces basic circuit analysis using Kirchoff's laws.
  6. Capacitors and Inductors
  7. Capacitors and Inductors, part II This article goes into the practical applications of inductors and capacitors, frequency effects and phasor diagrams.
  8. Diodes
  9. Op Amps
  10. Relays
  11. Transistors
  12. Optoelectronics THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  13. Meter Circuits
  14. Amplifiers THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  15. Filters
  16. Alarm Circuits THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  17. Feedback Control Loops THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  18. Timer Circuits THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  19. Basic Logic Circuits What all those 74xxx chips are for. THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  20. Simplifying Logic Circuits Boolean Math, Karnough Maps, and other techniques THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  21. Computer/Microcontroller Interfacing
  22. A/D and D/A Converters THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  23. RS-232 THIS ARTICLE IS NOT YET AVAILABLE
  24. What's all this PN stuff?