>> if you are a hobbyist student or just a smart kid
>>  and you want to play electronics in your garage or in your basement,
>>  what experiments would be interesting for you ?

In college I was rather disappointed to discover that the EE lab  
courses were rather unlike the sort of "experiments" I would have  
been interested in; they were more about learning to use relatively  
standard equipment to measure characteristics of relatively  
"standard" circuits, which you assembled exactly as shown in some  
book.  Sigh.  I guess it was vaguely interesting to see the  
transistor curves actually plotted and looking like the plots in the  
theory texts, but ... there was no EXPERIMENTATION.  (Chem and  
physics labs were like this too.  Logic circuits (a CS class at the  
time) were a bit, but not much, better.)

So I'd LIKE to see something like: Here's a switching power supply.   
Look at these interesting waveforms.  Now lets change the inductance  
here by a factor of five or so and see how things change.  See this  
cap here?  It's supposed to make the transistor switch faster; watch  
what happens when we remove or change its value.  And gate  
capacitance is something to worry about; lets connect this cap in  
parallel with the gate so we can actually see what happens...

Digital-wise, I liked building more complicated circuits out of MSI.   
My more memorable projects include shift registers made from JK and D  
flipflops (LED chaser!), debounce circuits, etc.

I had a proposal afoot to turn obsolete computers into useful lab  
instruments.
http://www.instructables.com/id/%5bIdea%5d-Turn-an-obsolete-PC-into- 
an-Electronics-Eng/
You know: Add some meters and a current limiter and tap the power  
supply, use the audio out as a signal generator, using the audio in  
as a scope, parallel port as a simple logic analyzer.  All stuff  
that's been done, at least one at a time, but with a unifying GUI  
that put it all together.  I still think it would be neat, but  
"obsolete computers" are quickly some of the useful components.

BillW

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