Where did you learn about electronics?

[magician13134]

Everytime I visit here, I feel really dumb, because everyone seems to know so much

So I'm wondering, did you guys know this stuff when you were in highschool (or are in currently in highschool?) and should I be worried that I don't understand very much of it if I want to major in EE/CS?

[adafruit]

i really learned everything in college. i was awful at electronics in high school. like i couldnt even solder

[magician13134]

You mean to tell me that you weren't born with a soldering iron in your hand as legend has it?

[jgotthardt]

Hi,
I started learning electronics at about age 10 helping my dad with various projects. I built a bunch of Heathkits and got my amateur radio license at age 14. This was back in the late '50s and early '60s so most everything was vacuum tubes and relays with metal chassis, point-to-point wiring (no PCBs), and 300 volt DC power supplies! (My first solid state project used a Raytheon CK722 Germanium transistor.)

I got into microprocessors in the mid 70's with Motorola's M6800 series. Built an evaluation board that communicated with a surplus ASR33 teletype via a 20mA current loop (no PCs or IDEs back then).

Been away from electronics for quite a while, then discovered Atmel's AVR and the Arduino project, and especially, this site.

Thanks Ladyada.

[Entropy]

Hmm. "All of the Above"? It has been an ongoing process for me.

Although while I had some electronics experience prior to college in high school, I guess I learned the most when in college.

[dol-sen]

too late for the poll, but...

I started learning back in grade 7 when a buddy and I started helping out a paralyzed electronics instructor work on his homemade electric wheelchairs, ham radios, etc..
Then in high school grade 11 & 12 had several electricity and electronics courses.

Sleep learning works by the way. The instructor use to nearly put me to sleep during his transistor theory lectures, it was a real struggle to keep my eyes open (damn for being seated at the front). Some of those lectures have stuck with me over the years better than anything else.

I then did one semester of the electro-tech program at college followed by 2 years of car/home stereo installation & repair. 30 years later I'm getting back into it a little.

[magician13134]

Is the poll really closed?! Huh! Anyway, our highschool doesn't offer any fun classes like that. That kinda ticks me off, but I guess I do enough on my own that at least I'll know what I'm getting into in college.

[westfw]

Well, it started back in gradeschool, when my Dad let me "help" put together some Heathkits. Even our 4H club did some electronics. Later, I put together some of my own, and I had one of those "40 projects" kits. Assorted books (this was back in an age when the library had a "adolescent" section full of "project" books, magazines (popular electronics, Radio Electronics, QST, even Scientific American.) I took assorted classes in high school and learned some theory, then more in college (LOTS of theory; very little actually building things.) And more reading and such since then. It's not like you learn electronics during some 4-year period and then you're DONE!

[darus67]

I would have to vote "All of the above"

I started learning when I was young. My dad built Heathkit stuff and I got
a "65-in-one" electronics lab for christmas one year. My dad gave me
some of his old electronics books to read. Also, my dad & older brother were
into Amateur (Ham) Radio. I got my Ham license when I was in 8th grade.
When I was in high school I took electronics all 4 years.
After high school I went to college and got a bachelor's degree in electronics.

I also started teaching myself about computers my first year of high school.
I wasn't allowed to take any official computer classes until 2nd year, but by
then I had learned more, on my own, than was taught in the class.

I've been working with computers and electronics as a career ever since.

[Entropy]

Pretty similar history to darus67 for me:

Got started early with some small projects with my dad and numerous "N-in-1" electronics kits.

Went to the ham shack at Boy Scout camp once in 7th grade or so, and then got my ham license in 8th.

I continued learning about electronics while in HS, and took an electronics course there, although I did not learn too much as I already knew most of it. Still, by this time I knew I wanted to major in EE when I went to college. So while some people go to college with no clue what they want to major in, I actually chose colleges based on their EE departments. MIT was my dream school until I toured it - campus too ugly. I ended up at Cornell, and that's where I learned most of what I know, especially in Bruce Land's ECE476 Microcontrollers class.

I went on to get my Masters' focusing on communications theory and signal processing, now I'm an RF engineer in upstate NY.

[Larry]

<snip>
So I'm wondering, did you guys know this stuff when you were in highschool (or are in currently in highschool?) and should I be worried that I don't understand very much of it if I want to major in EE/CS?

----

Magician, et al,

For what it's worth, I started learning electronics when I was in Jr. highschool, mainly by taking things apart (and trying to build new things out of the parts.) Motorized toys were one good source, and (Oh, well, I'm going to date myself with this datum) transistor radios were another good source of components. A major sticking point was getting my parents permission to use a soldering iron. Until I won that battle, I pulled the spring terminals out of a (well-used) radio shack "50 in one" kit, and made a "poor kid's" protoboard. (Note: a woodburner actually can be made to serve marginally as a soldering iron, but was *far* from ideal!
But I never got caught, or burned down the house.)

I actually made a great leap forward when I was home sick for several weeks (pneumonia -- not fun.) After complaining that daytime TV was boring me to death, my dad got me a couple of electronic kits to keep me busy. By then I was hooked -- and electronics/building stuff was a good reason to learn/apply math, which (until then) was only on my so-so list of subjects.

The good thing about electronics is that (so long as you stay away from high voltages and wet feet), you can teach yourself and it's pretty safe.
IMHO, learning electronics is easier now than it was back then. You can google for datasheets, and there are a wealth of online/mail-order sources for all kinds of nifty stuff (kits, ideas, help forums.) -- And protoboards are way cheaper (when I first priced them, the Hunt brothers were cornering the Silver market, and protoboards were *expensive* -- at least compared to my modest budget back then.)

If you're interested in electronics, by all means, give it a shot!

-- Larry

[eil]

There's no "other" option, so I'll just tell my story.

My interest in electronics started around the age of 12 when my mom and dad bought one of those 120-in-1 electronics projects kits with the springs for terminals. Although the book that came with it was horrible at teaching theory, I still gleaned quite a bit and came up with some interesting projects on my own.

Since I lived out in the sticks away from any real education, I never did get the chance to learn much about proper electronics theory. My skills eventually degraded to the point of, "hey, let's see how much voltage it takes to make this diode explode! Hmm. 13 volts. Alright, now this capacitor!" The Internet wasn't quite evolved enough yet to have in-depth coverage on a lot of topics and I was more into video games and computers at the time anyway.

I decided to enter the Air Force since 1) I didn't have money for college, 2) my parents refused to pay or even help pay for college, and 3) I didn't want to be in college-debt for the better part of my adult life. It was a pretty good move. Despite my meager electronics experience, I still scored really high in the electronics area of the ASVAB test so I joined up and specified my desired military career as "Electronics - Open," meaning the AF could place me in whatever electronics job needed filling. I ended up in "Avionics - Guidance and Control - Backshop (2A1x2)." It was a six-month tech school: the first three months of which were basic electronics theory and the final three months were aircraft systems theory. It was those first three months of tech school that taught me most of what I know so far about electronics.

If nothing else, the Air Force taught me how to be a lean, mean, soldering machine. I tell you, I could solder like a madman. People in the shop would ask me to do the tiny wires and other parts for them because I could do a really excellent job in 5 minutes on a part that would take some others an hour with mediocre results. (Mostly, they just didn't want a Sergeant to tell them to do it over.)

In my job, we mostly did bench-testing and repair of autopilot systems and aircraft control electronics. That too was a lot of fun, getting to break out the tech manual and unfold a 20-page-long schematic to troubleshoot some obscure problem for an autopilot box that was engineered 40 years ago.

After three and a half years of that, I decided to call it quits and go back into the real world because my true passion was computers and there is (or was) no such position as Linux System Administrator in the Air Force. Over the years, much of what I used to know about electronics has sadly been forgotten due to lack of practice. About a month ago, I caught a website mentioning the x0xb0x and since then have had a non-stop yearning to build one, thus re-inspiring me to get back into electronics. I'm ordering all the parts, trying to re-learn everything I once knew and get myself a proper station built-up so I can do some fun electronics stuff once again.

[Tipp]

I began at somewhere around 14 years old, after building an air cannon that used a solenoid valve. I became quite fascinated with electronics after that, and began, like most of you, taking things apart to see how they worked, or to salvage parts. In my first year of high school I started out with simple logic, then simple IC's like 555's, 4017's, etc. I looked for interesting circuits online and found ways to build them with the resources I had. I built some high energy devices in my second year, such as 2 small Tesla coils, a number of increasingly higher power coilguns, and my own little welder. I got into microcontrollers shortly after that. I built an LED scrolling sign for a school project in Grade 11. I've done, and learned, a lot more between then and now.

Right now, I'm in my first year of Engineering at Dalhousie University, and plan on majoring in EE. From what I understand, they teach you from the ground up, so I wouldn't worry about not having much previous experience, though it certainly couldn't hurt. Good luck!

[westfw]

Hmm. All of the above. Mt father got one of those electronics educations in the military (WW2 for him, but I've known several people who have started that way), and I first got interested in electronics helping him put together a heathkit radio. I got some heathkits of my own, and the electronics "multi-project" sets, and read magazines like "Popular Electronics", "Radio Electronics", and the assorted book and data book.

I took what classes were available in my high school. (It was also in high school that I noticed that nearly all the projects I had made could have been programmed in a microcomputer instead. Alas, microcomputers were still pretty out-of-reach at that point.) More books, of course. CMOS Cookbook, TTL Cookbook, TV typewriter cookbook. Junior year I started to use a computer (ASR33 timesharing system, you know...)

In college I was an EE major, and picked up more theory than you can shake a stick at, plus a lot of "Computer Science." Alas, not much actual BUILDING of electronics in college (our senior year, we discovered that a good portion of the class didn't really know how to solder...) My addiction to computers grew deeper, and there were areas of EE that didn't agree with me (RF, EM.) I graduated and moved into a career that was more software-centric (on mainframes!) than EE related. My first computer, an S100 system that was supposed to run CPM, never really got off the ground.

After I graduated, the IBM PC got released, microcontollers started to appear with EPROM and EEPROM/Flash memory, and the electronics "project" landscape changed substantially. Everything microcontoller that I've learned is post-college, on-my-own learning (college CS classes used 6800, 8085, 8088, so this was helpful, but no actual microcontrollers.) The software profession and the EE background/education do intersect nicely somewhere near the microcontroller. It helps that my software interests were mostly low-level stuff...

[Leo]

this thread makes me happy becuase I never got into electronics in high school, my school didn´t offer any classes. I figured in a carrer aspect I was screwed. I have a new hope...

As far as college goes... I still have to wait a bit before I go to college