Inaugural Post!

This is the first post of a new blog dedicated to the practical design of electronic circuits.

Hopefully this blog will help both you, the audience, and myself better understand the design and analysis of electronic circuits for a variety of purposes.

A little about me: I'm currently studying electrical engineering at a university in the middle of the U.S and I've been tinkering with electronic since a pretty young age.

A lot of people out there are interested in electronics projects as a hobby.  Specifically, there is, or was, a community devoted to building homebrew guitar effects and amplifiers.  Unfortunately, many of the websites one finds containing information about those topics are extremely old and haven't been updated in a long time.  Many of the links point to non-existent Tripod pages, and the ones that work point to a hand-drawn schematic or a GIF that's been saved as a JPEG again and again to the point of illegibility.  How frustrating!  Moreover, practical explanation of the theory is hard to come-by and often outdated.

The most important thing I've learned about engineering in my years is the importance of simplification.  Sometimes the amount of effort expended by engineers to make something easy dwarfs the effort needed for the original task.  That's why we have developed simple models for circuit elements.  Linear is easier to think about than non-linear.  Pretend an op-amp is linear and you'll be okay most of the time.  Don't worry about the temperature coefficient of a resistor most of the time.  Round off those last few decimal places!

Breaking apart the problem into smaller problems is the best way to manage the complexity.  Sometimes you will have to worry about the interaction between those problems though; that's where experience can help inform a solution. 

The niche I hope to serve is that group of people who haven't been completely turned off on the whole proposition of creating unique projects with their own knowledge.  Electronics isn't about buying a kit and soldering it together; that's soldering.  It's not about replicating a schematic without understanding it.

Electronics is a little weird and mathematical.  It's frustrating and confusing at times.  The dichotomy between theory and practicality can seem insurmountable.  However, with some knowledge and effort, electronics can be interesting and gratifying.

In my next post I will introduce you to what I believe to be a unique circuit for a guitar effect, as well as some basic knowledge you will need to follow along.  We'll refine it as we go and try to realize it.  I'll also hopefully introduce some tools to help, and I promise they won't be Windows-only programs that need a trip to The Wayback Machine to grab a demo that only works in 256-colors mode.