My interest in electronics goes back quite a long way. When I was in the 7th grade, my dad helped me build a crystal radio. I remember the fascination of hearing a radio signal with a device that had no batteries at all. Not long after that we built a Heathkit stereo together, which at the time felt like assembling a serious piece of equipment.
A little later I built a Heathkit fuzz box for my brother’s guitar, and at one point I managed to resurrect an old shortwave radio that had stopped working. Over the years I tinkered here and there with small projects like these.
Looking back, I probably should have studied electronics in college, but I chose chemical engineering instead. As a result, I ended up with a kind of informal understanding of electronics. I knew what many components did and I could occasionally get things working, but I never had the systematic foundation that comes from studying the subject properly.
Recently I decided to return to this interest and learn electronics the right way, starting from the fundamentals and working forward in a more organized way.
As I’ve been studying from several books, I’ve found that reading alone is never quite enough. The real understanding comes when you build something, measure it, and see what actually happens.
So alongside my reading, I’ve been doing small experiments at the workbench—simple circuits, basic measurements, and little investigations using a breadboard and a digital multimeter.
This series of posts is essentially my working notebook. It follows along with what I am studying and records the small experiments I have done to reinforce what I’m reading.
Rather than writing formal lab reports, I’ve chosen to present these as workshop-style exercises. The idea is that you could follow along and do the same experiments yourself if you wished. Each post introduces a small idea, builds a simple circuit, and measures something about it.
This approach also reflects something I discovered during my years of teaching. Over time I realized that I often learned a subject best when I was trying to teach it to someone else. Explaining an idea forces you to clarify it in your own mind.
So these posts serve two purposes at once. They help me organize and reinforce what I am learning, and they may also help someone else who is curious about how electricity and simple circuits work.
Everything here will be simple, practical, and hands-on. We’ll start with the very basics—measuring voltage, current, and resistance—and gradually build up to small working circuits that we can explore and measure.
Well, almost. This first post will cover some basic concepts and definitions but unfortunately no experiments. This will be the only one without any hands on work. I promise.