Old Book Teardown #20: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 7 (1999) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Charge Changer. I am the Charge Changer!

In this video we take a look inside Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 7 by Rudolf F. Graf and William Sheets.

Some circuits of interest included:

Page Circuit
385 DTMF Infrared Transmitter
524 FET Tester
916 Electronic Parrot
925 Voice-Effects Simulator Circuit

And some new terms that we learned were:

  • VFO: Variable-Frequency Oscillator
  • LM3914, LED Driver, similar to LM3915 and LM3916
  • MMIC: Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit
  • Balun: balanced to unbalanced; balancing unit
  • NE602: signal processing IC

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Old Book Teardown #19: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 6 (1995) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Technical Director. I am the Technical Director!

In this video we take a look inside Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 6 by Rudolf F. Graf and William Sheets.

Some circuits of interest included:

Page Circuit
387 Heartbeat Transducer
531 Geiger Counter
663 FM Bug

And some new terms that we learned were:

  • AGC: Automatic Gain Control
  • ALC: Automatic Level Control
  • IF: Intermediate Frequency
  • He: Helium
  • Ne: Neon

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Old Book Teardown #18: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 5 (1994) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Switch Switcher. I am the Switch Switcher!

In this video we take a look inside Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 5 by Rudolf F. Graf and William Sheets.

Some circuits of interest included:

Page Circuit
150 Bug Detector
224 IR Pulse Audio
256 Simple Lie Detector
257 Chapter 49: Light Comms
326 Voice Disguiser
373 Chapter 61: Moisture and Fluid Detectors
554 Speech Scrambler
556 Chapter 93: Sound Effects

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Old Book Teardown #17: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 4 (1992) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Capacitor Captain. I am the Capacitor Captain!

In this video we take a look inside Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 4 by Rudolf F. Graf and William Sheets.

We noted while going through the book that πP is short for “microprocessor”, or, essentially what we’d just call a CPU these days.

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Old Book Teardown #16: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 3 (1991) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Prime Hack. I am the Prime Hack!

In this video we take a look inside Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 3 by Rudolf F. Graf.

Some circuits of interest included:

Page Circuit
245 Electronic Dice
327 Adder
337 Electrostatic Detector
594 On/Off Inverters

Some things we needed to look up while flipping through:

CMRR is Common-Mode Rejection Ratio.

RIAA is Recording Industry Association of America.

RIAA equalization is a specification for the recording and playback of phonograph records, established by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

PUT is a Programmable Unijunction Transistor.

φ (phi) can represent an angle, typically the second angle mentioned, after θ (theta).

PEP is Peak Envelope Power.

For voltage signals you usually want high input impedance and low output impedance.

LVDT is a Linear Variable Differential Transformer.

NAB is North American Broadcasters. They defined phonograph standards similar to the RIAA’s.

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Old Book Teardown #15: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 2 (1988) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Digital Dancer. I am the Digital Dancer!

In this video we have a look inside Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits Volume 2.

Circuits of particular interest were:

Page Circuit
3 Differential Voltage or Current Alarm
33 Low-Cost Chime Circuit
34 Sliding-Tone Doorbell
109 Demonstration Comparator Circuit
151 Crystal Tester
274 Precise Wave Generator
321 Back-Biased GaAsP LED Operates as Light Sensor
341 Magnetometer
566 Modified UFT Relaxation Oscillator Produces Clean Audio Sinusoids

Some notes concerning things which came up:

SCS = Silicon-Controlled Switch: an SCS (Silicon-Controlled Switch) is a four-layer thyristor device — basically an SCR with an extra gate — that gives you extra control (including a way to force it off). It’s a member of the thyristor family used for controlled switching in low-power applications.

Ga = Gallium.

As = Arsenic.

P = Phosphorus.

Compander = compressor + expander. It’s a system (or device) that compresses the dynamic range of a signal before transmission or storage and then expands it back to (approximately) the original dynamic range at the receiver/playback end.

The NE570 / NE571 (and SA571) are dual compandor ICs: each chip contains two identical compressor/expander “kits” (full-wave rectifier → temperature-compensated variable-gain cell → op-amp + trim) used for dynamic range control and noise-reduction in audio/communications systems. They’re widely used as companders, VCAs, limiters/noise-gates and as the compressor/expander around BBD delay lines to reduce hiss.

β (beta) — also written hFE or hfe on datasheets — is the transistor’s current gain. For a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) it’s the ratio of collector current to base current: β = IC / IB.

Q (quality) factor: measures how selective or sharp a resonant system is. High Q → narrow bandwidth, slow damping (lots of ringing). Low Q → wide bandwidth, heavy damping (quickly dies out).

I asked ChatGPT to please explain damping and ringing.

The 5558 IC is a dual op-amp in the 1458/1558 family (often labelled LM1558 / MC1558 / 5558 depending on maker). These are general-purpose, internally-compensated dual operational amplifiers (audio, filters, integrators, buffers).

My programmable load is the ZKETECH EBD-A20H Electronic Load.

SCA = Subsidiary Communications Authorization / subcarrier (used for background music/data in FM radio broadcasting).

We encountered Chebyshev filters which are analog or digital filters that have a steeper roll-off than Butterworth filters, and have either passband ripple (type I) or stopband ripple (type II).

UJT = Unijunction Transistor, a three-terminal semiconductor device (Emitter E, Base1 B1, Base2 B2) with a single PN junction and an internal resistive path between B2 and B1. It’s widely used as a simple relaxation-oscillator/timing/trigger device because it shows a controlled negative-resistance region when the emitter is driven above a threshold.

PUT = Programmable Unijunction Transistor; a PUT is a three-terminal semiconductor device (Anode, Cathode, Gate) that behaves like a unijunction transistor but whose trigger (peak) point is set externally by resistors — i.e. it’s programmable. It’s essentially a four-layer PNPN device (closely related to SCRs in internal construction) with the gate used to set the firing threshold.

My anti-static monitor is an Auto-alarm Anti Static ESD Wrist Strap Tester Output Anti-static Online Monitor For Anti-static Electronic ESD Meter.

A squib is a small explosive which can be used as a detonator.

A “TR circuit” can mean variously:

  • a T/R (transmit–receive) switch used in RF systems
  • a transformer-rectifier (TR or TRU) — a transformer plus rectifier used for AC→DC power
  • Tr often used as an abbreviation for rise time (tᵣ) when discussing pulse/transient performance

SSB = Single-SideBand — a form of amplitude modulation where the carrier and one of the sidebands are removed so only one sideband (upper or lower) is transmitted.

The 2N4871 is a classic silicon PN unijunction transistor (UJT) used for timing/oscillator and trigger circuits.

RTD = Resistance Temperature Detector, a temperature sensor that measures temperature by sensing the electrical resistance of a metal element, which changes predictably with temperature. RTD stands for Resistance Temperature Detector.

A Theremin is a type of musical instrument.

The 4069 is a hex inverter.

The 4046 is a Phase-Locked-Loop.

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Old Book Teardown #14: Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits (1985) | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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Silly Job Title: Tome Pumper. I am the Tome Pumper!

In this video we take a look inside the Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits.

The pages which have circuits I thought were interesting and will consider building are: 358, 415, 420, 520, and 597.

Here are the pages I scanned while working through the book:

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Old Book Teardown #13: Student Manual for the Art of Electronics 2nd Edition (1989) | In The Lab

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Silly Job Title: Surge Sage.

In this video we have a look at an old book, the Student Manual for the Art of Electronics (find on archive.org). This old book references The Art of Electronics 2ed, but The Art of Electronics is up to 3ed now. In this video we just flip through the book to see what is inside.

This book is made obsolete by Learning the Art of Electronics 2ed, which is an ongoing project of ours.

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New Book Teardown #7: Electricity and Magnetism 3rd Edition (2013) | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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Silly Job Title: Prime Hack.

In this video we tear down Electricity and Magnetism 3rd Edition written by Edward Purcell and David Morin and published in 2013.

Electricity and Magnetism is one of the books I am taking notes for as a part of my Learning the Art of Electronics project. These notes are a perk for people who support me on Patreon, so what are you waiting for!? :)

There is a website for the book maintained by the publisher, but regrettably there’s not much there, just some material available to instructors only: https://www.cambridge.org/Purcell-Morin

I mention two xkcd comic in the video, those are these: Farads and Nerd Sniping.

The “esu” is prounounced as “eee-ess-you” and is also known as the Statcoulomb.

I mention the Franck–Hertz experiment which happens to be something I wrote a Hackaday article about: A DIY Version Of The Franck-Hertz Experiment.

The first edition of Electricity and Magnetism was volume two in a five volume course: Berkeley Physics Course.

The books mentioned in Chapter 1 include The Flying Circus of Physics and How Things Work.

The websites mentioned in Chapter 1 are:

The Feynman (1977) reference is to The Feynman Lectures on Physics which is also available here: www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

The symbol: ∇ (“nabla”, an upside down Δ “delta”) is the vector differential operator and its key uses are:

  • ∇f → gradient of scalar
  • ∇·F → divergence of vector field
  • ∇×F → curl of vector field
  • ∇² → Laplacian

The Big Clive video that I mentioned was this one: How a stungun creates 20kV from a 9V battery.

I also mention the show’s wiki, the ITL Wiki, which is on the web over here: https://www.inthelabwithjayjay.com/wiki/

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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!

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