|
Published:
April 26, 2022

Electronics All-in-One For Dummies

Overview

Open up a world of electronic possibilities with the easiest "how-to" guide available today

If you're looking for a new hobby that's tons of fun—and practical to boot—electronics might be right up your alley. And getting started has never been easier!

In Electronics All-in-One For Dummies, you'll find a plethora of helpful information, from tinkering with basic electronic components to more advanced subjects like working with digital electronics and Arduino microprocessors.

Whether you're just getting started and trying to learn the difference between a circuit board and a breadboard, or you've got a handle on the fundamentals and are looking to get to the next level of electronics mastery, this book has the tools, techniques, and step-by-step guides you need to achieve your goals—and have a blast doing it! You'll learn:

  • Critical safety tips and strategies to keep yourself and your environment protected while you work
  • Useful schematics for everyday devices you can put to work immediately, like animated holiday lights and animatronic prop controllers
  • How to work with alternating current, direct current, analog, digital, and car electronics, as well as Raspberry Pi technologies

Perfect for anyone who's ever looked at a circuit board and thought to themselves, "I wonder how that works?", Electronics All-in-One For Dummies is your go-to guide to getting a grip on some of the coolest electronic technologies on the market.

Read More

About The Author

Doug Lowe is the information technology director at Blair, Church & Flynn Consulting Engineers, a civil engineering firm. He has written more than 50 For Dummies books on topics ranging from Java to electronics to PowerPoint.

Sample Chapters

electronics all-in-one for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

As you design and build with electronic circuits, you’ll invariably find yourself scratching your head trying to remember what color stripes are on a 470 Ω resistor or what pin on a 555 timer integrated circuit (IC) is the trigger input. Never fear! This handy Cheat Sheet will help you remember such mundane details so you can get on with the fun stuff.

HAVE THIS BOOK?

Articles from
the book

The 555 is one of the most popular integrated circuits (ICs) ever made. When you use it, you need to be aware of the purpose of each of the eight pins in the 555 package. You may also occasionally use a 556 IC, which consists of two 555 timers in a single package, and the same applies to knowing its pinouts as well.
The figure shows a basic setup for using a single, 16-channel ShowTime PC controller to control up to 16 separate strands of lights. Although you can design the circuitry to control light shows from scratch, the easiest way to build a light show is to buy an inexpensive lighting controller. A basic setup for a 16-channel ShowTime PC Light-O-Rama controller.
The figure shows a typical animatronic prop used in a Halloween haunted house. The prop is a large jack-in-the-box that benignly plays "Pop Goes the Weasel" while a crank on one side of the prop slowly spins until an unsuspecting visitor approaches it.Then — all in one frightening moment — the music stops, the lid flies open, a large clown head pops up, a bright light comes on to ensure that you can see the clown, and a ghastly voice screams, "Trick or treat!
Before you start working with line voltage in your electronic circuits, you need to understand a few details about how most residential and commercial buildings are wired. The following description applies only to the United States; if you’re in a different country, you’ll need to determine the standards for your country’s wiring.
In this simple electronics project, you get to build a simple breadboard circuit that connects an LED to a Raspberry Pi via the GPIO port on pin 3 of the header. The figure shows the completed project. The Raspberry Pi LED Flasher (Project 55).In this project, you connect an external LED to a Raspberry Pi, and then use a simple sketch to turn the LED on and off at 0.
The figure shows the fully assembled prop controller used to control a jack-in-the-box prop (also shown in second figure). As you can see, the prop controller is made from three circuit boards, which you can purchase from EFX-TEK.The boards are mounted on an 8x10-inch sheet of Plexiglas, which you can purchase from most hardware stores.
In a ShowTime PC controller (see figure) or other similar holiday lighting controller, lights are controlled via channels. Each channel is a separate electrical circuit to which you can connect one or more strings of lights. It's important to keep in mind that the controller can't control the individual lights that are connected to a channel; all the lights on a single channel operate together as a single unit.
You can use many different types of lights with a Light-O-Rama or other lighting controller (see figure). Take a trip to any department store during the holiday season, and you'll find a wide variety of lights to choose from, or you can purchase lights from online sources such as 1000Bulbs.com or Christmas Lights Etc.
As you design and build with electronic circuits, you’ll invariably find yourself scratching your head trying to remember what color stripes are on a 470 Ω resistor or what pin on a 555 timer integrated circuit (IC) is the trigger input. Never fear! This handy Cheat Sheet will help you remember such mundane details so you can get on with the fun stuff.
Semiconductors are used extensively in electronic circuits. As its name implies, a semiconductor is a material that conducts current, but only partly. The conductivity of a semiconductor is somewhere between that of an insulator, which has almost no conductivity, and a conductor, which has almost full conductivity.
There are several different ways to design a color organ circuit. Most of them rely on a special type of electronic component called a triac, which is essentially a transistor that's designed to work with alternating current.It has three terminals. Two are anodes, called A1 and A2, and the third is a gate. A voltage at the gate — either positive or negative — allows the anodes to conduct.
After you have gathered all the materials you'll need to build a color organ, you're ready to assemble the project. See What You Need to Build a Color Organ Circuit. You'll need the following tools: Soldering iron, preferably with both 20 and 40 W settings Solder Use thicker solder for the line-voltage wires and thin solder for assembling the MK110 kit.
When you're setting up a holiday light display, you can purchase a ShowTime PC controller from Light-O-Rama as a do-it-yourself kit, but you'll have to assemble it yourself. That means you'll have to solder all the components to the main circuit board, install the board into the weatherproof container, and connect all the various cords that are required for the unit to work.
The ShowTime PC controller used to create holiday lighting displays communicates with the outside world using a digital protocol called RS-485. Most computers don't have an RS-485 port but do have a USB port. The USB adapter converts the USB signals to RS-485 signals so that the computer can communicate with the ShowTime PC controller.
Before you can fire up your Raspberry Pi and start building your own electronics projects, you need to do some basic setup work. Start by setting up the hardware. You'll need the following to set up your Pi so that you can program it for your projects: A Raspberry Pi 2 or 3. A suitable power supply: The Raspberry Pi requires a 5 V power supply connected via a micro-USB connection on the card.
To put a color organ circuit to use making interesting sound and lighting effects, you'll have to connect both lights and a sound system to the color organ.The procedure for actually using the color organ is quite simple: Connect a light to the color organ's female extension cord connector. Connect a speaker-level audio input to the RCA connector.
Raspbian is a special version of Linux that is designed especially for the Raspberry Pi. Although you can run other operating systems on your Pi, Raspbian is the most common choice.When you start up your Pi for the first time with a microSD disk containing NOOBS, the NOOBS program displays a list of operating system choices that you can install.
Light-O-Rama's most popular lighting controller for residential use is called the ShowTime PC controller, shown in the figure. Several companies sell lighting controllers for holiday displays. From Light-O-Rama, you can purchase preassembled lighting controllers, or you can purchase kits and assemble the controllers yourself.
In Light-O-Rama, a sequence is represented as a grid that's somewhat similar to the grid in a spreadsheet program. For example, the figure shows part of a very simple sequence in which the lights on channels 1, 3, and 5 alternately turn on and off every half second. A simple Light-O-Rama sequence.Each row in the grid represents one of the channels available in the controller.
Sometimes in electronics you have no alternative but to whip out your calculator and do a little maths. The most likely reason is to calculate how much resistance you need for a given situation, how much current a circuit is going to pull or how much voltage will be dropped between two points in a circuit.You can make all these calculations by using one of the following formulas derived from Ohm's law: In the above formulas, V represents voltage (in volts, naturally), I represents current (in amperes), and R represents resistance in ohms.
General-purpose input/output (GPIO) ports make Raspberry Pi much more than just a very small computer. GPIO ports allow you to control your own electronic circuits directly from the Pi. The 40-pin GPIO header on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 provides access to a total of 17 GPIO ports that can be controlled from programs you write in Python or other languages.
Since the introduction of the original Raspberry Pi back in 2012, an almost dizzying array of versions has been released. The Raspberry Pi has been through three generations, known as 1, 2, and 3. Each new generation has incorporated new features.The Raspberry Pi 2 was introduced in 2015. It improved upon the Raspberry Pi 1 by using a more powerful processor and additional RAM, while holding the price the same.
If you're assembling a ShowTime PC controller for your holiday light displays, it's a good idea to test it before use. You must first install the Light-O-Rama ShowTime Software Suite and the device driver for the USB adapter. Then, follow these steps to connect your ShowTime PC Controller to your computer: Plug both of the power supply cords from the ShowTime PC controller into electrical outlets.
Whether it's used in a haunted house, trade show exhibit, store display, or museum, a typical animatronic prop requires the following elements to achieve the desired effect: Most props require some sort of trigger to initiate the prop's routine. The trigger can be as simple as a button that you or a customer pushes to start the routine, or it could be a timer that causes the prop to start up automatically every 5 or 10 minutes.
The meat of the Light-O-Rama Software Suite is the Sequence Editor, which lets you create light sequences that are synchronized with music. A sequence is a file that stores the information needed to synchronize lights with one selection of music. The music itself is stored in a separate audio file in the MP3 format.
A Raspberry Pi (sometimes just called a Pi for short) is a very small computer. Raspberry Pi is a popular alternative to Arduino, BASIC Stamp, and other types of microcontrollers and is the ideal computer for people who love to make their own gadgets.Physically, a Raspberry Pi resembles an Arduino or a BASIC Stamp.
Other than the Velleman kit itself, most of the materials you need to build a color organ circuit can be purchased at your local RadioShack store or any other supplier of electronic components. The table lists all the materials you'll need. Quantity Description 1 Velleman MK110 Simple Onee Channel Light Organ
Simply put, a color organ converts the volume of an audio input into an output voltage that gets higher as the sound source gets louder. If you connect a light to the output, the light will glow brighter when the audio input is louder and dimmer when the input is quieter.One of the great things about Disneyland is that sometimes the long line you have to wait in to go on a particular ride is almost as good as the ride itself.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6630d85d73068bc09c7c436c/69195ee32d5c606051d9f433_4.%20All%20For%20You.mp3

Frequently Asked Questions

No items found.