Hi there! Welcome to Teach-IN 2000! This 12-part series (which commenced in the Nov '99 issue) leads you through the fascinating maze of what electronics is all about! We shall assume you know nothing about the subject, and so shall take individual components and concepts in simple steps and show you, with lots of examples, what you can achieve, and without it taxing your brain too much!

Through these simple steps we hope to prove to you that using electronic components need not be a complex task and that, providing you think about each stage of what you are trying to create, you can actually design and build something that works!

Check out Part 1 (in .pdf format)

The vast majority of the Teach-In exercises and experiments are carried out on a plug-in breadboard, and use a 6V battery as the power source. You do not need a soldering iron for the first several parts of Teach-In. However, later in the series, some of the circuits discussed will benefit from construction on a printed circuit board allowing their long-term use as items of test equipment. For these constructions a soldering iron will be needed.

Although this Teach-In will not instruct you in soldering techniques, we have available an excellent and highly-acclaimed Basic Soldering Guide in the EPE Online Library (see main navigation).

The subjects to be covered include (amongst other things) facts and equations for using resistors, capacitors, potentiometers, diodes, light emitting diodes, transistors, logic gates, other digital circuits, operational amplifiers, liquid crystal displays, signal waveforms, Ohm's Law and its derivatives, binary and hexadecimal logic, analog to digital conversion, digital to analog conversion, computer interfacing, timing calculations, frequency generation, frequency counting, and simple audio amplifying, to name but a few of the wide array of subjects to be featured.

To assist you in getting to know about the various building blocks, a set of illustrative computer programs has been prepared (these FREE programs are available from the EPE Online Library).

The series is not directly related to any formal courses or qualifications on electronics, but is based around those subjects that the author has found to be most important during several decades of involvement in electronics, both professionally and as a hobbyist. It should appeal to anyone of any age who wants to get to know what electronics is all about, and to put it to good use.