Electronics

Before you take “anything” to pieces you can take photos (or even video) of the whole project, then at different important stages of the process, so that when you put it back together you have visual aids of the important steps to help you find out where everything goes.

You can never have too many photos of what you are doing.

This is especially useful with anything that is colour coded like wiring (plugs etc) or something that comes apart in a special order.

When soldering and the solder does not glue to the steel or wire, sand the mental or wire with sandpaper or maybe a Dremel/rotary tool with a grinder/sanding tip/disc, to remove any surface covering that may be stopping the soldering process from being completed.

Before soldering the end of wire it pays to twist the wire.

Many people solder the wire ends before putting them into connectors to keep the connection strong.

If you have a Potentiometer and when it is used it is not working correctly it can be where the “wiper” is hitting the track it is running on worn tracks. One quick fix is to pull the “pot” apart and use a pencil to draw the track back in.

If you have trouble recognizing the colours on resisters use a good magnifying glass to make the resistor bigger in the magnifying glass and the colour bands can then be seen more clearly.

A Soldering Station is worth the money and far superior to a cheap soldering iron, for serious soldering projects.

Always have decent lighting in any room that you are working in. It is easy to overlook such a simple thing, but to preserve your eyesight, and to see clearly it is wise to have good lighting and possibly a portable lamp you can use in dark areas.

Save jars for holding items and label the jars.

Desoldering is the process of heating the already soldered part and removing the solder with a Desoldering Station, a Solder Sucker or Desoldering Braid/Wick.

Get a good multimeter. A decent one is helpful and will last many years giving good performance and dedicated service.

It pays to read up and learn, for fun, about old “cures”, such as not putting stereo speakers near CRT VDU/Monitors because the magnets can affect the screen. Also if VHS and Cassette tapes are put on magnets of stereo speakers they can be wiped or the data somewhat corrupted by the magnets in the speakers.
What may not be popular now may still be used by some and if you wiped their precious musical or video memories accidentally that would be an unsatisfied customer for sure.

In ATM Machines, in the Safe, the Money Cassettes used to have to be put in order, for instance $10’s at top, $20’s in the middle and $50’s at the bottom, and this was all checked by reed switches. But these have been done away with now, and the cassettes can be installed in any order now.

The symbol C in italic or slanted type, is for Capacitance.

The same symbol C normal is the Coulomb unit of charge.

Vcc = Voltage Common Collector. + Voltage. Power input of a device.

Vcc can be positive or negative compared to Gnd (Ground).

When first getting into computer power supplies and electronics one can be forgiven for being confused when one finds out that we deal in positive and negatives when dealing with supplying power to circuits & electronics.

The Ampere-Meter requires the circuit to be broken, to allow insertion of the meter.

ROM - Read Only Memory.

Bias: Short for Bias Voltage, a voltage applied to an electronic device to ensure that it operates on a particular portion of its characteristic curve.

Carbon Contact Keys - Glue a small disk foil over worn carbon layer for better contact.

The anode is usually the positive side. A cathode is a negative side.

There are a lot of variations in electronics so please don’t take anything for granted. If you are hesitant about something find out about it, investigate, do your research.

An IC is an Integrated Circuit - Chip.

MSI = Medium Scale Integration. Those IC’s (Integrated Circuits) that contains between 30 and 1,000 electronic components on a single chip.

These are sometimes called, “Extra Hands” and “Helping Hands”, they are very useful for holding wire and other items to be soldered or worked on.

The magnifying glass is excellent for seeing small electrical items and seeing resistor colour bands etc.

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Get used to reading Schematic Diagrams and learning all the names for the components and their symbols.

I used to spent hours just reading these, looking at them, trying to trace the components in the circuits, and in some cases just trying to figure out what the circuit does.
As time goes by you become more used to certain wiring diagrams and you will find that you will recognise smalls circuits in bigger diagrams.

It pays to learn of the history of the components to get a better idea of what it can be used for and the original intentions of that part from the beginning. Some were vacuum tubes, made of glass, mental, plastic etc. The Diode, John Ambrose Fleming patented the thermionic diode, the first practical vacuum tube electronic device, in Britain in 1904, to be used as a detector for radio signals, that sort of history.

I found it exciting to learn the history of the pioneers of electronics like André Marie Ampere, Georg Ohm, Fleming, Michael Faraday,, Edison, Gustav Hertz, Marconi, James Maxwell, William Shockley, etc. It all makes interesting and exciting reading as you get a closer look at the history f the subject, the why’s and how’s that made it all come to be what it is today. There are educational videos of these people and the components to help you better understand how electronics became the powerful force in the homes of billions of people all around the world.

There are many tricks to help you remember the components and also their schematic symbols.

In the example above you can see with the PNP Transistor that the arrow is pointing to the Base, so we can say that it is Pointing Near Plate (PNP).
The NPN Transistor (Image on the right) the arrow is pointing away from the Base, so we can call that Not Pointing Near. Get the idea? Easy to tell which Schematic Symbol is PNP and NPN.

From My Notes…

Notes are taken while doing courses etc, so I recommend you double check. Taken with a grain of salt.

Magnetic Flux (Φ) (Phi).

Flux Density: B.

A North Pole (N) repels another North Pole and North and South are attracted to each other. (Magnets).

Microwave: Micro meaning very small and wave for electromagnetic oscillations. Thus microwaves are very short - wavelength electromagnetic oscillations.

MOSFET: Metal-Oxide Semiconductor field-effect transistor.

Alpha - Emitter to collector current gain.

Ampere-Turns: NI, Where N is the number of turns, multiplied by the I current.

RGB - Red, Green, Blue.

BCD - Binary Coded Decimal.

The longer the wire the higher the resistance, the thicker the wire the less.

Conductance = G

Siemens = S Reciprocal of R.

S = amperes per volts.

Mutual Inductance (M) is between L1 and L2.

MMU - Memory Management Unit.