🚀 go-pugleaf

sean@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Sean P. Nolan) writes:
>
>I'm looking for advice from people here on how to get started actually DOING
>something with electronics. I've read a few books and have a pretty good 
>understanding of what various components (discrete and within ICs) do and how
>they work. But I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do now. Picking up random

I got started, 15 years ago or so, by picking up some 74XX ICs and a breadboard
from Radio Sh**, reading "The TTL Cookbook" (By Don Lancaster, I believe)
and some 555 (timer) technotes, and just plunging in by doing simple
things.

Now I'm an experimental physicist making $12,000 a year and living in Pasadena.

Since TTL is showing its age, you may want to use CMOS instead, but
the 555 is still a great chip for making an LED blink.  You don't have to
know how to bias a transistor (I didn't learn until 6 years ago), but
Op-amps are easier anyway.  As long as you laugh when someone mentions
"Ohm's Three Laws", and have a rough notion of what a capacitor does,
you are ready to begin learning to use ICs.

		David Palmer
		palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu
		...rutgers!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!palmer
    "Direct quotes don't have to be exact, or even accurate.  Truth is as
    irrelevant to a newspaper as it is to a court of law"
	- Judge Alarcon, 9th circuit court of appeals (paraphrased)