Electronics Technique Resources

A tentative page for electronic practice for more experienced practitioners, some of this material has been moved from the Basics page.

Components

Components: an overview of basic electronic components

Soldering

• soldering tutorials
• smd soldering tutorial 1 - hand-soldering teeny tiny chips!
• smd soldering tutorial 2 - Toaster Oven Reflow Soldering!
• Another SMD soldering tutorial (covering toaster oven and rework with a heat gun and solder wick
• Construction techniques - Home made Arduino prototype shield
• How to Prototype Without Using PCBs

Make/ commission your own PCBs

• Making your own very simple PCBs, with (relatively) minor expense
• Another DIY PCB tutorial, focused on home fabrication of SMT breakout boards
  • DIY PCB using the laser printer toner transfer method
  • DIY PCB toner transfer results
• Inexpensive service If you can supply a Gerber file, the nice people at BatchPCB.com, connected with Sparkfun, I believe, will make a PCB for you, and make it available to others too, IF you wish. Remember: Fast / Cheap / Good: You cannot have all three. I believe BatchPCB concentrate on the "cheap" and the "good" for you. (There is advice on their site about the Gerber file thing.)
  • SeeedStudio is another PCB manufacturer that supports Open Hardware
  • a long list of PCB manufacturers (at the OpenCircuits Wiki) will accept Gerber files and make a PCB for you. Many of them are much faster -- and much more expensive -- than Batch PCB.

Electronics books

See the following forum discussion for more info: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1167350858

• Books for beginners
  • Physical Computing by Tom Igoe, Dan O'Sullivan.
  • Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mims III.
  • CMOS Cookbook by Donald E. Lancaster.
  • Designing Embedded Hardware by John Catsoulis.

• More advanced theory and technique books
  • Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz.
  • IC Op Amp Cookbook by Walter Jung 3rd Edition.
  • ARRL Handbook by Dana G. Reed (Editor).

• Encyclopedic books that may change your life
  • The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill.

Electronics resources on the Web

• http://www.as-workshop.de/ pretty comprehensive introduction (in german) on electronics for artists and designers. Entry level.
• http://www.allaboutcircuits.com
• Socratic Electronics, teaching electronics through the socratic method.
• Electronic Tutorials, about Power Supplies, Power dissipation, De-coupling and input protection.
• Workshop Sessions, about driving DC motors, relays, stepping motors, rotary encoders and LEDs as sensors.
• Sensing and Control: Concepts and ideas for hobbyists and schools, from Sheepdog Software.