Why Are Electronics Books so Hard?

A few weeks ago, I went to the library with my wife. I checked out some of the electronics books they had, and something interesting dawned upon me…

First, I have to say that I feel confident in my ability to build pretty much anything when it comes to electronics.

I’ve designed microchips, I’ve designed see-through-wall technology with radar, I’ve designed the prototype for an award-winning coffee roaster, and much more.

But when looking at the books I realized that there is a lot that I don’t know from these books.

A Typical Electronics Book

If you look at some of the most popular books on learning electronics, you’ll see chapters like “Semiconductors”, “Filters”, “Oscillators, “Operational amplifiers”. And when you open up these chapters, you usually find that the topics are explained by using mathematics.

For example, I wanted to see if I could find the easiest way to blink a light according to these books. The reason is that a blinking light was the first circuit I ever learned. So I wanted to see if any of these books would have helped me back when I was starting out.

To blink a light, you need something that turns on and off repeatedly. In electronics, this is called an oscillator.

So, I looked at the oscillator chapter in one of the books I found. And you know what? I did not understand the explanation!

There were boxes with letters in them and conditions about box A needed to be bigger than box B and resonance frequency and whatnot.

I remember learning about these things at university. But I also remember not really understanding them, even though I might have been able to calculate correctly.

It Doesn’t Have to Be That Hard

My understanding of components and circuits have instead come from practical experimentation and looking at what’s going on with the voltage and current in the circuit.

Maybe it means that those topics aren’t really that important to your goal?

What I realized was that many of the topics are not really important. It’s great to have a basic idea around them, but you don’t really need to know how to design a Colpitts Oscillator unless you really want to. You can live a happy life, building advanced electronics without ever learning that.

What is important to learn?

The things that are important to learn are the very basics of electronics – like what the most common components do, and how voltage, current, and resistance behave together. And how to use integrated circuits (important).

When you have those basic things down, practical skills are the most important things to focus on for a while. Learn to put together circuits from a circuit diagram onto a breadboard. Then learn to solder circuits onto prototyping boards (perfboard/stripboard). Then learn to design your own printed circuit board (PCB).

If you know all of the above, then you can build whatever you want.

You might protest: “I know the above and now I want to build an automatic cat feeder – but I have no idea how!”

But this is the life of an electronics designer. You never know how to design something unless you’ve designed it before. You usually have to do some research, read up on new components, and ask for advice.

So that’s what you’ll have to do now.

If you need help, these are all things you’ll get help with as a member of Ohmify.

Copyright Build Electronic Circuits

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What is a Voltage Regulator?

A voltage regulator is a component that converts a voltage to a lower (or higher) level.

A typical example is if you want to use a 9V battery, but you need 5V in the circuit. For example to create a portable USB charger. Then you can use a voltage regulator that takes those 9V as an input and creates a stable 5V output to use in your circuit.

Or if you need different voltage levels for a circuit you’re building. Let’s say you have a circuit with a microcontroller that needs 5V and a motor that needs 12V. Instead of using two power supplies, you can use just a 12V supply and add a voltage regulator that provides 5V for the microcontroller.

How To Connect a Voltage Regulator

Usually, you need a few extra components connected to your voltage regulator to make the output a bit more stable. At least a capacitor or two. But it depends on the one you choose. You’ll find info about how to connect a specific voltage regulator in its datasheet.

For example, the voltage regulator 7805 is a common one. It gives you 5V out. From the 7805 datasheet, you can find this example circuit that shows that you need two capacitors:

Voltage regulator with 5V output

Types Of Voltage Regulators

There are two common types of voltage regulators that are worth knowing about:

• Linear Voltage Regulators
• DC-DC Switching Regulators

The linear voltage regulator is the simplest one that only requires a couple of capacitors and maybe a resistor or two to work.

Examples of linear regulators are the 7805 and the LM317 with an adjustable output voltage.

LM317 circuit with adjustable output

The DC-DC switching regulator is a bit more complex and needs an inductor and a diode to work. One example is the LM2596. But often you can find these as small modules (look for DC-DC converters) that have everything needed on the board.

A DC/DC converter module

The main difference between the two is that a linear regulator wastes much more power than the switching regulator. So the linear regulator can easily get really warm if you don’t provide good cooling.

Also, the switching regulator is the only one that can give you a higher output voltage than the one you put in. A linear regulator will always give you a lower output voltage.

How Linear Voltage Regulators Work

There are many ways to design a linear voltage regulator. Here’s maybe one of the simplest:

The output will always be the Zener voltage of the diode minus the V_BE voltage of the transistor. V_BE is usually around 0.6V to 0.7V. So with a 5.6V Zener diode, you’ll get around 5V on the output.

If the output voltage goes up beyond 5V, that means V_BE becomes lower. That would make the transistor reduce the current so that the voltage goes down again. If the output goes lower than 5V, the opposite would happen.

How Switching Regulators Work

The other main type is the switching regulator. This is a voltage regulator that is switching the input voltage on and off and uses some smart circuit tricks with an inductor to convert the voltage in a much more power-efficient way.

There are 3 main types:

• Buck converter – Can convert to a lower voltage
• Boost converter – Can convert to a higher voltage
• Buck-boost converter – Can convert both to a lower and a higher voltage

Here’s the basic concept of a buck converter:

When the switch is pushed, current flows into the inductor, capacitor and load from the battery. Both the inductor and the capacitor gets charged. When the switch is released, the stored energy in the inductor and capacitor provides the current for the load.

In real life, the switch is replaced by a transistor. And there is a sensing mechanism that checks the output voltage and turns the transistor on and off faster (to get more voltage) or slower (to get less voltage).

Questions?

Let me know what questions you have about the voltage regulator in the comment section below. I’ll do my best to answer them and update the article accordingly!

Copyright Build Electronic Circuits

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