On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 16:05 +0100, Lindy Mayfield wrote:
> Everyone has given me good advice, which I will follow.  But what I don't understand is how you -- I don't know the words I'm looking for -- how you read a circuit.  If it were a program, I'd could start at the beginning and follow the flow keeping track of variables, like a debugger does.
> 
> I think I'm trying to do that with circuits and sort of my question is, am I doing this right, or is there a proper way that I haven't figured out yet?  Do you start at + and work your way to - ? 

The way I read circuits is like how you read a sentence. When you read a
sentence you don't see a series of letters, instead you see a series of
words made up of letters. Each word has it's own meaning, and when you
couple two words they increase (or refine) their meaning.

It's similar with circuits. I don't see a bunch of transistors, a few
resistors, a power and a ground. I see a transistor in common emitter
config, AC coupled to a class B driver stage, connected to a speaker.

This sort of thing comes with experience. Alot I learned on my own, some
I learned in University. There are areas were you must understand a
least some of the math to get a grasp of how a circuit is supposed to
work (i.e. AC circuit analysis, small signal analysis).

The best way IMHO to start is to start building the basics. Start with
resistors and voltage sources. Learn what a resistor divider is, the
series and parallel rules, thevenin equivalents.

When you are comfortable with that, start with op amps, they are
mathematically very simple (from a 1st order approximation point of
view) yet can do amazing functions (amplify, invert, integrate,
differential, etc).

Once you grasp that try going "deeper". Learn the standard BJT
transistor configs and build them, experiment with them, tweak them.

At this point you are ready for small signal type stuff. This is where
math becomes more important, but you're still in the realm of being able
to build useful circuits that demonstrate the math.

Different people learn different ways. To me, learning the theory was
OK, but actually building the circuits is where I truly started to
understand how things work. Also, building the circuits gives you an
instinctual insight into how things work, so you aren't just memorizing
formulas, you're actually understanding WHY the formulas are the way
they are.

TTYL

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