Learning the Art of Electronics a Handson Lab Cour

Learning the Art of Electronics: A Easily-On Lab Course , , Cambridge U. Press, 2016, 1150 p, $79.99, ISBN 978-0-521-17723-8 Buy at Amazon

The third edition of the widely used guide to electronic excursion design, The Art of Electronics (Cambridge University Press), hit bookshelves in 2015. Now its companion volume, previously the Student Transmission for the Art of Electronics (Cambridge University Press, 1989), has doubled in size and scope. Author Thomas Hayes, who has taught laboratory electronics at Harvard University for more than ii decades, designed the new volume for a full-semester laboratory course. Learning the Art of Electronics: A Easily-On Lab Course is organized into 26 chapters, each offer rich context and clear explanations in labs, notes, supplementary material, and worked problems. A close overview of the book's contents volition give instructors the best sense of whether the $80 investment will pay off for their courses.

The book's labs are balanced between analog and digital electronics. Hayes begins with familiar analog circuitry and includes discussions of voltage dividers, Ohm's and Kirchhoff'south laws, and Thevenin equivalents. The labs tackle RC filters in both fourth dimension and

frequency domains

with a cheerful approach that is not overly mathematical, although as a

physicist,

I would take liked a more nuanced description of why voltage signals announced to "pass through" a

capacitor.

By lab 3, students use their RC filters to build an AM radio receiver.

The book moves on to cover

bipolar transistors

at increasing levels of complication. Students build a discrete operational

amplifier,

or op-amp, the fundamental building block of analog electronics. The sequence features some of the book's best labs; students who complete them will no longer take for granted the

integrated circuit

op-amps that have been widely available for l years.

After explaining how to build an op-amp, Learning the Art of Electronics devotes four labs to using them. In ane peculiarly well-designed lab, students amplify and integrate the signal

generated

by twisting the shaft of a

servo

motor, producing an output point that corresponds to the angular position of the shaft. The concluding op-amp lab instructs students on how to make an agile filter and a power booster, effectively illustrating the challenges of op-amp stability.

In lab 10, students build a proportional-integral-derivative controller to regulate the position of a DC motor. Voltage regulators, both linear and switching, are constructed in lab xi; lab 12 introduces analog switches. Two types of

oscillators

are covered: the venerable 555

relaxation oscillator

and the lamp-stabilized Wien bridge. In lab 13, students use the 555 to modulate FM audio transmission. Two labs cover digital logic. New in Hayes's update is an introduction to programmable array logic, or PAL, and its Verilog compiler, used in lab xvi to create a 16-bit counter. (Verilog is a figurer language for describing digital logic circuits.)

The last quarter of the course proceeds along parallel microcontroller paths. Instructors tin can choose between path ane, in which students use an 8051 microcontroller to build a microcomputer—a "big-lath computer" complete with external memory and address coach—or the shorter path 2, in which they utilize a standalone 8051 microcontroller and develop code on an external computer. Hayes makes a strong pedagogical example for the commencement approach, which is similar to the way he had students build an op-amp before using commercial

integrated circuit

op-amps. Yet he acknowledges that path 2 "is the style anybody else in the globe works with microcontrollers."

Students on the microcomputer path begin with lab 16 and its 16-fleck counter, which serves every bit an address counter for Hayes's big-board computer. The next couple of labs encompass, amidst other things, analog-to-digital converters and state machines, useful for sequenced operations such as serial communication protocols. Lab xix offers a choice amidst four digital projects.

Over the next five labs, students gather (path 1) and plan (either path 1 or 2) the microcomputer or microcontroller with the assistance of code examples in assembler and C languages. The book concludes with a gallery of games and other creative student final projects. Appendices comprehend analog and digital oscilloscope usage, a Verilog primer, and notes on transmission lines.

With more than than 1100 pages, Learning the Art of Electronics is a massive and ambitious text. In any undertaking so big, typos abound, but an agile errata website is gathering corrections for subsequent printings. The book retains many of the handsomely drawn circuits of the original The Art of Electronics and is much more comprehensive. However, some attention-getting analogies—for example, figure 4N.12, which describes a "rose colored lens" in terms of a stout girl and a scrawny boy—set the incorrect tone and should have been retired in 1989. The editors, I doubtable, know this; both the caption and a footnote invite the reader to interchange genders, and yet the sense of humour relies on body shaming either way.

Instructors will want to know if Learning the Art of Electronics can stand lone every bit an undergraduate lab text. The respond is yes. While the book does cantankerous-reference The Art of Electronics, it "means to be self-sufficient," and information technology achieves that goal. I would lean toward path 2 for the microcontroller labs, given the low-price, high-pin-count microcontrollers and compilers that can be readily substituted to streamline last projects. In no way, still, should that recommendation be considered a criticism of Hayes's fine introduction to electronics.

  1. © 2017 American Institute of Physics.

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Source: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3560

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