(This is how I think about software too fwiw. Start trying to write something on your own, then study the technical detail after, the technical detail will have something to relate to instead of just floating abstractly away. Then try to apply it yourself again, you'll probably be excited to use it at that point.)
I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do <x> for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848
I do think there'd be a lot of value in blog or youtube series of experienced circuit designers showing how they approach things, why and how they pick components etc, it's a great way to learn. The blog post that HN thread is about is really good as an example.
I've had several people recommend "The Art of Electronics" as a reference for circuits building as well, but haven't read it yet
Using it to learn circuit design (just at the schematic level, still) would take serious effort (hundreds of hours) and would be far more effective if done with a skilled instructor.
There used to be simpler, smaller books that showed a simplified design process for circuit building blocks.
Rod Elliott's website, sound-au.com, has an extensive section on "theory" at the hobbyist level[1]. If you use it, please donate to help Rod keep the site up.
But, now there is https://learningtheartofelectronics.com/ Learning the Art of Electronics, which is a practical course with labs to complete, etc. It is very, very good. I am using subsets of it (with scaffolding/additional practice) to teach smart middle schoolers to design transistor circuits implementing amplifiers, oscillators, and logic gates.
All while separating analogue electronics, digital electronics, RF, and signal processing as appropriate.
Self-taught people are almost always too eager to get their hands on a soldering iron, and end up with a jumble of information, instead of intuitive understanding.
But if those self-taught people spend enough time, that jumble of information becomes deep empirical knowledge. At the end of the day, developing an understanding of electronics just comes down to how much time you are willing to invest in studying datasheets, working out schematics, fabricating circuits and keenly observing. Understanding the math and physics is deeply valuable and a great gift, but empirical knowledge is just as valuable- if not more. After all, Faraday (and all the others who did the work that eventually led to our mathematical and physical understanding of elecric circuits) did not need theory to do his experiments.
I think I've a PDF copy of The Art of Electronics. One day...
That's my reading, too. He isn't quite the 3b1b of electronics. But that's not a statement of the quality of the content; just that he caters to a different audience, perhaps.
He works for Kahn academy as well and is an incredibly talented educator
It's an excellent book and highly regarded for a reason. I have a pro-tip about it, though... don't feel as if you need the most recent edition. The older ones are still great and relevant, and buying it used will save you a few bucks.
"Practical Electronics for Inventors" is another good one that I found much more approachable and also more inspiring.
If you live near a university, you can probably sit in on lectures (analog-design, analog circuits, microelectronics). There are also many videos on YouTube. (If you're not really interested in repairs, skip those as that is slightly different skillset.) One really good channel is Sam Ben Yaakov's https://www.youtube.com/@sambenyaakov
Developing a mental model of circuits also takes practice. The practice can mean simulation or playing with an oscilloscope and components on a breadboard but you need the feedback loop: designing/tweaking the circuit, checking if the behavior matches your expectation, finding what you missed if there's something wrong. Start with simple circuits and gradually work your way up to more complex ones.
Also, I had watched some videos from Behzad Razavi.
My favorite is LinSpice because it runs well for free on a mac, but the UI is very quirky. There are web sims available as well.
This will let you get started immediately and will let you see what's happening visually.
As the other person mentioned, you can do a lot in simulation. KiCad now has a builtin ngspice support (trough it's still a bit rough.) On windows, ltspice is another quite popular free option.
But pick up an 80's tape recorder or amplifier that's busted and you're going to have fun learning. Start on the simplest stuff you can find and work your way up from there.
This bench really looks focused on hobby prototyping, nicely done with that in mind, and with the proper assortment of components in multiples so you can go from idea to funtional circuit directly without encountering the show-stoppers (or delayers) that can be so common otherwise.
A repair bench can be made to avoid a somewhat different set of show-stoppers, there will not only be a number of different things more useful at your fingertips, but a deep store of off-bench material and tools still accessible allowing much more powerful operation. Also taking up much more auxiliary space than any one optimized bench.
Either way you never avoid all the unforseen show-stoppers, so you need a clear location to shelve & preserve an incomplete prototype or repair/restoration project, for instance while waiting for parts, in order to fully clear the bench for other work which can then be quickly accomplished from start-to-finish.
And then there's the "production" bench for hobbyists where prototyping and repair is not so much of a consideration.
Collect 'em all.
LTSpice is useful for analog electronics. You can simulate and see all the waveforms at all the nodes. You can see what small capacitors are doing.
Good discussion from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222457
Years later I landed on a team of makers and started to work on ambitious projects- various high power LEDs, motion control systems, etc. This is where my gap in knowledge- especially wrt high power electronics, diodes, and any chip-based component- became a real problem. So I built ambitious stuff and when it didn't work, or was flaky, I'd show it to somebody who knew electronics deeply and they'd explain whatever the next thing on my list to learn was- pull-up resistors, constant current supplies, MOSFETs to control high power devices, connecting up an SPI bus between a microcontroller and sensor, schmitt triggers, bias, etc.
I got really good at making small repros of larger projects, handing them to somebody, having them solve the basic problem, then taking the learnign from the repo and putting it into the real project.
Eventually, after doing that a lot I was able to to read Art of Electronics and got a lot more out of it. most recently I was building a custom circuit to drive a vacuum tube and had some problems, and somebody mentioned Spice. So i got LTSpice and put my circuit in, and learned just enough to have it spit out what I was seeing in real-life on my oscope. OH MY GOD, it was a revelation. The simulation produced exactly what I saw and I quickly debugged the problems. This has always been true- if I have a simulation, I can learn to intuit how things work faster than if I have to assemble them manually.
My mental model now is all about modularity- building the individual bits of a larger circuit, debugging those, then integrating them together. There are so many details in analog that you have to be aware of; if you're missing a pull-up resistor or a schmitt trigger or have too much EMI, you might get it to work 30% of the time or have to do bounce elimination in software.
Another thing to be aware of is in the past 20-30 years, a lot of discrete components gained alternatives that were chip-based and move a lot of the smarts into the chip. Sure, you can build an H-bridge from components to make a bidirectional motor driver. But that motor driver from Pololu has decades of intelligence about driving motors- and reverse polarity protection (I plug things in backwards all the time) and self-limiting (if you push too much power, it shuts down, instead of frying). I've had problems with components that could have been solved by an EE.
I don't know if I could actually design any non-trivial circuit, but then, what exactly do you need to design today? Most of the work is in identifying what your problem is, then finding the existing solutions.
EEVblog #279 - How NOT To Blow Up Your Oscilloscope!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaELqAo4kkQ
It goes into detail about how the ground lead on the probes is ground and the fact that you have to pay attention to where you are connecting them otherwise you can create a short circuit. Note that all the probe grounds are connected together, so connecting two ground leads to two different circuit nodes effectively shorts those two nodes together.
That and calculus-based Physics 2 in college.
You can get a decent basic model for under $100.
When I was a teenager, I couldn’t have imagined having access to the level of hobbyist affordable equipment that exists now.
This guy Moritz Klein has a YouTube channel explaining the wizardry behind analog synths:
https://youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0
I’ve watched the VCO one and it helped in my understanding but I still need to breadboard it to fully grasp it.
He has a collaboration with Erica synths that not only results in a cool euro rack synth but also provides a explanatory manual. This coupled with the YouTube videos I think will help in my understanding of circuitry.
https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/diy-kits-1/mki-x-esedu-diy-s...
Probably the best skill investment you can make is learning to sketch on impedance paper. It will demystify passive networks, and it's a gateway to so many other techniques like Bode plots. Eventually you won't even need the special paper most of the time. I recommend getting one printed and laminated to use with a dry-erase marker.
It's best to learn the analysis along with how to simulate it and take the measurement. The discrepancies will reveal problems with the circuit, measurement errors, and limitations of the models. Your sketches will show how it works, you'll visually see what needs to be done even before you know how to do it, and you can play with design ideas right on the sketch.
There are of course many other techniques for different situations. If you use discrete transistors, maybe learn to sketch a load line and check if a resistor is bad using a multimeter. If you do radio, learn to do impedance matching with a Smith chart.
I would also recommend building your own project, and having it made at one of the Chinese fab houses. Even something as simple as replicating an Arduino will teach you A LOT.
I productized an arduino prototype by self teaching, and it’s all really not that hard once you get a grasp of the basics.
There are also simplified operational models of some components such as transistors and op amps.
Assembling kits is a valuable first step, in that it gets your hands working. Being a bit more confident about your construction practices helps when you later try to make your own stuff, because you don't have to wonder if something like a solder joint is working. The more you can trust that your build is modeled by your schematic, the better a chance of locating the place where it isn't. That's your failure point.
I was a physics major in college, but a year of electronics was part of our curriculum. It was taught from The Art of Electronics, first edition. We were also required to buy the National Semiconductor Linear Applications Handbook, and a book on a mainstream IC logic family, which was TTL at the time. That stuff is all available online. I was fascinated with this stuff, so I read the applications handbook from cover to cover. IC application notes are still a good thing to study.
You can take another route. There's gobs of stuff you can do with a microcontroller board and pre-made peripherals such as sensors and actuators. It won't turn you into an analog jock, but it's a legitimate design method and might suit your fancy.
Imagine something like: "This needs to be biased a little bit more positive, here we use a precision diode, that needs a little bit of negative feedback, ..."
Math is important, but much more important (IMO) is a systemic understanding of how parts of the ciecuit influence each other and where they are (or should be) decoupled more or less.
To be fair, that’s probably the correct first step in most cases. You might move on to tracing powers and grounds in the search for basic catastrophic faults, you might wipe IPA over the board and look for the bit that evaporates first (or if you’re fancy then an IR camera looking for suspect hot spots sinking excess current), but the first step on an unknown failure is probably always going to be a look and a sniff.
Edit: this is a good description https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/understa....
To be fair, I have a physics and engineering background and do really understand how these components actually work, and where this metaphor breaks down, but I still find this mental model is what I use to intuitively design circuits that work.
But the thing is that I never had a clear idea of how it worked; or, if some parts were broken, how to identify what was broken (other than, of course, sniffing for burned smell or charred look on the PCB). That condition is what I now realize as being unable to reason about the circuit at hand. As in, how would I arrive at that circuit by myself - being able to point at components and say, "this guy does this, and the other guy does this, and voila, we've dancing light".
I can name individual components and stuff, and can wave my hands and say what it does individually. The fact that I can't compose a circuit from scratch still gets me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how one can build an intuitive understanding and a mental model?