Old Book Teardown #12: Principles of Electronic Circuits 2nd Edition (1997) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Technical Director.

In this video we teardown this old book: Principles of Electronic Circuits 2ed by Stan Burns and Paul Bond.

Some quotes which came up in the video:

Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. — John von Neumann

If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics. — Richard Feynman

I mention that my friend from Learning as a hobby is going to send me the CDROM that goes with this book, so I will update this post with a link to the ISO when it arrives!

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


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Channel News #8: Update Regarding Upcoming Projects and Videos | In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

Silly Job Title: Capacitor Captain.

In this video I make excuses for why you haven’t had a video from me for two weeks. Excuses, excuses.

It is still my ambition to release three videos per week, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

As I mention in the video I have been working away on the Learning the Art of Electronics project and making notes for all five of the referenced books but I still have a heap more work to do. Further, I’ve been working through the first edition of Learning the Art of Electronics because my second edition hasn’t arrived yet. So today I bit the bullet and canceled my order of the second edition from Amazon AU (I’ve been waiting since January) and placed a new order with Amazon US so my second edition should now be arriving by May 24, later this week.

I have ordered some bits and pieces for my Logitech BRIO web cam including this stand, so I should be able to start making maths videos on my channel soon. But it will be very basic high school maths. If you want more serious maths I would be happy to recommend my friend who makes advanced maths videos on his channel Learning as a hobby.

Speaking of my mate on the Learning as a hobby channel he recently scored a copy of the CDROM that comes with Principles of Electronic Circuits 2ed and is making preparations to send me a copy (either as an ISO or in the snail mail), so standby for more on that. This is a super exciting development because I had concluded that finding a copy of this CDROM was going to be impossible, but here it is!

The long projects that I’m working on which are presently brewing include:

  • Silicon Chip and Jaycar Mini Project JMP003
  • Demo of EEVblog BM2257 multimeter
  • Old book teardown of Electric Circuits
  • Project #1 from Maxitronix 30in1
  • Lab #1 from Learning the Art of Electronics

I have made a start on all of the above but it’s going to take me some time to finish them all. In the mean time I am going to try to get some smaller projects done so that I can hit my target of three videos per week.

And that brings you up to date with news from the channel.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


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Today at Humble Bundle

My friend asked me what I got at Humble Bundle today:

Interlude #16: False Start for Learning the Art of Electronics | In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

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Silly Job Title: Lightning Tamer.

This project’s homepage is here: John’s wiki § Learning the Art of Electronics.

This video is me making a false start on the Learning the Art of Electronics series which I am just about to embark on. What happened was after I got a bit more than two hours into recording the video for the first lab exercise I realized that it was taking too long with my approach. I didn’t want to make another twelve hour video! I was planning to go through the literature in painstaking detail and cover everything, but it turned out there was way too much material for that approach to be feasible.

What I am planning to do instead for the actual first video (due out next Tuesday) is do all the reading by myself in advance and then offer a brief summary and some recommended reading. I’m going to try to make the bulk of the video the actual practical experiment/circuit and leave the reading out.

But since I recorded the video for this “false start” I figured there’d be no harm in posting it by itself. Most of this video is the Appendix O material from The Art of Electronics 3ed which is a brief introduction to oscilloscopes.

In this video we mention CMOS technology, particularly MOSFETs.

We mention the Josephson effect which can cause a current to flow across superconductors in the absence of an applied voltage.

The SI size prefixes are documented on my wiki.

In this video we learn about voltage and current.

We take a close look at Appendix O in AoE which introduces the oscilloscope and mentions delay lines.

The oscilloscope appendix makes mention of Asimov’s short story from 1960, Thiotimoline and the Space Age.

We mention quantization, Planck units, and Zeno’s paradox.

I show you can illustration from Getting Started in Electronics.

If you’re planning to follow along with the series the pre-reading for the first video coming out on Tuesday is: E&M ch. 1, 2; PoEC ch. 1; AoE app. A, ch. 1; LtAoE ch. 1N, 1L.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


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Mail Call #28: EEVblog BM036, Test Hook Clips, 4mm to 2mm Banana Adapter, a Book and a Movie

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

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In this video we see what’s come in the mail!

Also mentioned in this video:

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha USB 3.0 Powered 4-Port USB HubThis is an image of the product.

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Channel News #6: I Have a New Gig! Also I’m Planning Some Things | In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I report in about what’s going on around here.

My big news is that recently I got a gig working for Hackaday. You can find my articles over here: https://hackaday.com/author/JohnElliot

I mention that I am reading AVR Programming: Get Under the Hood of the AVR Microcontroller Family which is written by Elliot Williams who is Editor in Chief over at Hackaday. The big thing I am hoping to learn from this book is how to generate tones, but I haven’t read that part of it yet!

The new book teardown which I am going to need to re-record is for Electricity and Magnetism 3ed.

The old book teardown which I have been working on is for Electric Circuits.

I have done the introduction for the Maxitronix 30in1: Introducing Maxitronix 30in1 | Maxitronix 30in1 | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay but I haven’t done the first project yet. The thing that is tripping me up is making a decision about whether I am going to start doing the LTSpice simulations in the 30in1 videos or if I’m going to put that off until we start our next Maxitronix kit… I will have to make a decision about that soon.

I am working on Jaycar and Silicon Chip Mini Project number JMP003. But I’m stuck debugging it. I hope to catch up with that soon. I have heaps of Mini Projects to do, I am embarrassingly far behind.

I have recorded the introduction for the Learning the Art of Electronics project that we’re just about to kick off: Introducing Learning the Art of Electronics | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay but I’m still waiting for the 2nd edition of the book to turn up. Fingers crossed it gets here in the next couple of days otherwise I will need to start on this project using the 1st edition of the book.

There’s a bunch of stuff here that has arrived in the mail so you can expect to see a mail call video covering that stuff soon as well.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha Knife BladesThis is an image of the product.

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Are you the right person to design complex electronic boards?

This evening I watched Are you the right person to design complex electronic boards? which discusses what being a professional electronics designer entails. I particularly liked this slide which compares and contrasts the books a hobbyist might read versus what a professional might read.