Circuit Building labs

Hopefully the first two posts serve as a helpful introduction into peaking one's interest into EE and digital design. However, only so much can be accomplished in so little space. The primary way to jump into Electronics is to get your hands dirty with circuit building.




The book displayed on the right Practical Electronics for Inventors is a great book for circuit tips and guides for any electronic hobbyist -- which means its written in a clear easy to understand nature. Highly recommend to further your knowledge, and its cheap.

The University of Maryland offers many labs for this exact purpose. There are four required labs that range in difficulty and topics covered.

• Digital design lab (building circuits like the one mentioned before, but includes verilog programming) ENEE245
• Basic analog circuits, such as rectifier circuits and analog to digital converters. ENEE205
• 300 level transistor based lab, circuits include audio amplifiers and am transmitters/receivers. ENEE307
• 400 level lab of your choice, microprocessor lab, communications lab, etc..

These labs will help cement your basic understanding of the theory and strengthen your ability to work in the industry after graduation. Plus its just pure fun to construct circuits.

An example is an audio amplifier circuit I constructed with my lab partner and hooked up to our cellphones. It took the audio input from our cell phone's, properly amplified it over the frequency range and was used to drive a speaker

 Note: the music used was Dubstep...makes the circuit that much better




The quality of the video is pretty poor, but it was recorded from another phone. It's not completely obvious from the video but the knob being twisted is a potentiometer, a resistor that can have its resistance changed, which acts a volume knob.

When the oscilloscope comes into view the yellow lines are the input signals (in the milliVolt range) and the blue is the output (in the Volt range). Our circuit had a gain of about of about 20.

The PSPICE (circuit simulating software used all the time in UMD courses) circuit is:

My entire lab report can be seen here


Again, if there are any questions or comments, please leave them below!

-Brian