Category Archives: Book

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

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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! :)

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 395nm UV LampThis is an image of the product.notes

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Today at Humble Bundle

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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

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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: 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! :)

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!

ANENG A3005 Pen Type Handheld MultimeterThis is an image of the product.notes

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

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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 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.

Let’s go shopping!

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

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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.

Let’s go shopping!

Are you the right person to design complex electronic boards?

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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.

Introducing Learning the Art of Electronics | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

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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

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

In this video we introduce a new feature of the show. In these segments we will be working through Learning the Art of Electronics.

We will be doing a total of 27 videos for this feature. 25 labs, this introduction, and a conclusion. Videos will come out on the first Tuesday of every month (hopefully!).

We did a new book teardown for this book last year: New Book Teardown #3: Learning The Art of Electronics: A Hands-On Lab Course (2016) | In The Lab. You can see in the comments a number of people encouraged me to make videos for this book, so that’s what we’re doing now.

Also a shout out to my mate over on Learning as a hobby for encouraging me to undertake this project.

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!

JST XH2.54 6pin Pre-crimped ConnectorThis is an image of the product.

Let’s go shopping!

The Art of Electronics

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I am having a conversation over on New Book Teardown #3: Learning The Art of Electronics: A Hands-On Lab Course (2016) | In The Lab and I was asked about the various books that carry the title “art of electronics”, they are:

  • The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill currently in its 3rd edition. This masterpiece of electronics literature was first published in 1980 and has been the go-to book for anyone interested in learning about electronics ever since. It’s the textbook for many university electronics courses. The 3rd edition of the book was published in 2015.
  • The Art of Electronics: The x-Chapters also written by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill is a collection of supplementary material that didn’t make it into the 3rd edition of The Art of Electronics.
  • Learning the Art of Electronics is a companion book that provides a structured introduction to electronics through a collection of 25 lab exercises. It’s the coursework for many university electronics courses. The 1st edition by Thomas C. Hayes and Paul Horowitz was published in 2016. The 2nd edition by Thomas C. Hayes and David Abrams comes out in 2025.

Homework

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This is a part of the homework feature of my blog, which is an ongoing conversation with my mate S.F.

Hey mate. Lovely to see you again, as always.

I have a note here about Milo but I’m not sure why.

There is a rumor that the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is about cocaine addiction, particularly that the Seven Dwarfs represent the various stages. But Snopes says this theory is bunk.

Two authors Strunk & White wrote a book called The Elements of Style which is a style guide for formal grammar used in American English writing. Famously they said “let every word tell”.

The phone you gave me I named ‘skadi’ after the Norse goddess Skaði.

According to John Cleese in his hilarious letter Something of a Retraction: Cleese letter to the U.S., French fries aren’t French, they’re Belgian.

I heard a rumour that DeepSeek says there are three r’s in “strawberry” but I can’t find a corroborating source.

Penny Arcade is great. I mentioned this one: Dirty One.

In Laws and Sausages the structure of the United States of America is explained in a comic format.

In Death of a Salesman there is a famous quote “A salesman is got to dream. It comes with the territory.”

Tribal not racist.

I think all you need for subjective experience is one or more sensors. Both consciousness and self-awareness are different to that. Although they probably do entail subjective experience too.

I should have a promotions policy on my website. Thanks for the suggestion. I will look into this.

There is a famous RFC: Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. This, for instance, defines what the word “should” should mean.

The seven check marks are elements of white privilege, given as:

  1. male
  2. white
  3. heterosexual
  4. at least one highly educated or wealthy parent
  5. at least one parent born in the Netherlands
  6. a VWO diploma (preparatory scientific education)
  7. and a diploma from the University

In Outliers the author Malcolm Gladwell comes to the conclusion that success is mostly luck. In the same book Gladwell says that to attain mastery the a subject needs to be actively studied for 10,000 hours.

In Magic Words and How to Use Them the author explains how you can use uncompromising positivity to craft the life you want. Seemed to work for me, if you’re positive about people they seem to magically be positive back.

The Old New Thing is a blog from Raymond Chen, a long time programmer from Microsoft who had a lot to do with Windows.

I mentioned that Alan Kay worked for both Atari and Apple.

The famous quote “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” is from Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Asleep From Day by The Chemical Brothers.

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person from Alain de Botton.

Before you speak let your words pass through three gates:

  1. is it true?
  2. is it necessary?
  3. is it kind?