Originally published in 2012, this marked the start of my electronics journey.

This Christmas, I received a copy of Make: Electronics (First Edition) by Charles Platt, along with the accompanying Make: Electronics Components Pack 1a from Maker Shed. Just like that, I had a new obses^H^H^H^H^H hobby.

The book can be divided into three parts of roughly equal length. The parts in the first kit correspond to the first two chapters of the book. The kit comes with batteries, a solderless breadboard, hookup wire, a DC power supply and the various electronic components covered by the first section of the book. This part of the book covers basic theory of electricity and fundamental components such as batteries, switches, relays, resistors, capacitors, LEDs, and transistors. The kit and the first two chapters culminate in a siren circuit made only from transistors, resistors and capacitors.

I completed the projects covered by Component Pack 1 in about a week and ordered Component Pack 2a. The second kit, consisting mostly of soldering supplies and integrated circuits, includes the all the parts necessary for the next two chapters of the book. The third chapter starts by covering basic soldering skills. It then builds upon the siren circuit from the first section, eventually building it out into a full-fledged burglar alarm with magnetic window/door switches. Unfortunately, the burglar alarm did not survive the transition into a permanent project — a victim of my fledgling soldering skills. The lead-free solder in the kit may be the environmentally correct choice, but it didn’t make learning to solder very easy.

The fourth chapter delves into integrated circuits in the form of timers and discrete logic. It guides the reader through several projects including a reaction timer, a combination lock, a game show buzzer, and an electronic dice roller. All in all, the second kit took me another two weeks to complete. My favorite project from this section was the reaction timer, built from 555 timers, 4026 counters, and a seven-segment display. I’m pretty sure my partner thought I was building a bomb.

I really didn’t enjoy building the electronic dice out of 74LS TTL chips. The circuit was very flaky and I had to alter the resistor values given by the book to make it work. Maybe the point of this project is that TTL sucks (sorry old-timers). Apparently Charles Platt got this feedback from a lot of people, because the TTL chips have been replaced with CMOS HC chips in the second edition.

The fifth chapter starts by giving advice on how to set up an electronics workshop and suggests some additional books for further reading. It then covers an eclectic variety of topics including electromagnets, motors, generators, audio electronics, robotics, and microcontrollers. Maker Shed does not offer a kit to go along with this part of the book, but by this point, I felt confident enough in my skills to branch out on my own without slavishly completing the remaining projects in the book.

Overall I recommend both the book and the kits highly. The book provided a great hands-on introduction to hobby electronics by walking me through fun experiments without getting bogged down in theory, and the kits saved me the intimidation of placing my first order to Digi-Key or Mouser before I knew anything about the components I was ordering. While Make: Electronics definitely left me with some fundamental gaps in my understanding of electronics theory, it kept my interest long enough to get me hooked, and I believe that was precisely Mr. Platt’s goal.

Epilogue

With this blog, my aim is to bring you along on my journey as I learn electronics and share the interesting projects that I work on along the way. I have been working on a lot of great stuff since completing this book, and I hope to share more with you soon. I hope that others who are starting out will find my experience useful as my understanding grows.