Starting a hobby in building electronics
I became interested in electronics as a kid. It began when I started taking old radios apart.
During this time a wire came away from the loudspeaker and I realised that when the bare wire touched the terminal, the radio worked, it just needed to be “fixed” on. My grandma told me it needed “soldering” and she had a soldering iron. One that you stuck in an open fire to warm up, and in a few minutes we’d fixed the wire.
Not long afterwards we were in the village shop when I noticed an electric soldering iron. I knew I had to have it and after a few conversations with my mum and dad (and endless warnings of how hot it was), I had a soldering iron. So next I spent my time taking parts off old boads.
At this time I hadn’t a clue what I would do with them. My next discovery was a book. The ladybird books “Learn About Simple Electronics” and “Making a Transistor Radio”. These showed you how you could build small projects on a piece of wood using electronic components and wood screws and screw cups.
It’s no exaggeration to say that these two books changed my life because I went on the have a lifelong hobby and career in electronics.
I’m 57 and still building things now and I’ve also worked as an electronics technician at Leicester University, studied electronics at college, and worked for Marconi radar and numerous electronics companies over the years, so yes those two books definitely changed my life.
They showed me what was possible with a handful of electronic components. So what can you do NOW?
Beginning with electronics
In my opinion, learning electronics today is so much easier than when I started. There’s the internet for a start.
The only way I could learn in those “dark” ages, was to go to the library. Unfortunately, many of those books were written by electronics professors and were much too difficult to understand for a beginner.
Even some of the magazines at the time were a little over my head. So you’ve got the internet and all the videos it offers, what about the stuff you need? Good news on that front as well.
You can go on Amazon and have all the stuff you need to get started delivered to your door tomorrow.
What is a breadboard
While not exactly new they are still the best way to get started. I’m not kidding when I say with a breadboard and components and a free weekend you’ll probably learn more than any other weekend you’ve ever experienced.
You could end up with a lifetime obsession as well! It doesn’t take much knowledge to start in hobby electronics. You will build a working circuit of some sort in the first few hours. You’ll start to learn how components work and how they work together. Once you learn one thing it leads to another.
The more you discover the more you want to know. You’ll never learn everything. There’s always something you didn’t know and even if you did learn it all, there’s always something new.
Since electronics started, we’ve had the valve, the transistor, the integrated circuit, miniaturisation and most recently microcontrollers.
Breadboards
Electronics is all about components and how they are connected together.
Even a complex circuit like a computer motherboard or television is just electronic components connected together by a PCB which also serves as a place to hold together. It’s just the same with a breadboard. A breadboard holds the components but also has metal connections that provide electronic links.
It’s easy to find simple circuits to build and even if you get something drastically wrong and damage components or even the board it won’t cost you much money. It’s probably important to mention safety here as well. Stick to batteries and you’ll be fine don’t ever mess with mains until you know exactly what you’re doing even then you should take precautions like making sure you’ve got circuit breaker protection.
Once you’ve built a few simple circuits you start to realise that larger circuits are just a collection of smaller circuits linked together in different ways. Take a look at my how-to-build a synthesiser on a breadboard. This is a few simple circuits linked together on a breadboard and then these breadboards linked together to make something larger.
Some beginners think that breadboards are just for little pointless circuits but do go believing that for one moment. The synthesizer breadboard project makes something not unlike the Sequential Circuits Pro One. A synthesiser that came out in the 80s, but is still popular now, if you are into music there’s loads of stuff you can build.
You can still use breadboards when you experienced in soldering
Yes. indeed you can and will. You get to a stage when you’re building and trying your own ideas and there is still nothing quicker or better than a breadboard.
You’ll probably be swapping loads of components at this stage, altering values a lot till you get it right and plugging and unplugging is still the quickest way. You might want to start with a circuit you’ve found and make changes to it to experiment to see if you can make it more suited to your needs. With electronics the ideas are endless.
So you won’t outgrow breadboards I’ve been building and soldering for fifty years and still use my breadboards.
component tester
The new breed of components tester.
A special mention to component testers. Even when I was a kid I realised the importance of component testers.
As a beginner you will too when you can’t get something to work you’ll start wondering if the transistor you’ve plugged in is faulty. I found a small component tester for sale in the adverts of an electronic magazine.
It was far from perfect but it was all that was available at the time. There are now component testers around that are fantastic. Not only that but way cheaper than the price I bought (taking the cost increases since then) they are mainly quite similar but basically you connect a component up and press a button.
It then tells you what the component is and other stuff about it depending on what’s connected. Plug in a resistor, press a button and it tells you the value. Just the same with capacitors.
Plug a transistor in and it tests it and tells you whether it’s a PNP or NPN device. It also indicates the gain and other information not only that but for me, even now, the most important thing, the pin out. So you can check exactly which legs are the base, collector and emitter. Yes, you read that right! Gone are the days of having to work out the base, collector and emitter and measuring the resistance with a multimeter.
Just trying to hold the probes on the right legs was bad enough! No, you just plug the device in any way you like and the tester tells you the lot. If only these were around when I started. It would have saved me so much time and effort. If you are just starting out it’s a no-brainer to get one.
There are lots of tools in electronics and many will help you, many you can do without but this, for me, is essential!
It will test loads of different components. Resistors, capacitors, diode, LEDs most types of transistors chokes. Probably others I’ve forgotten.
Oscilloscopes
This is one of the optional tools. You will have seen one, even if you don’t know what it is, or what it does.
They used to be massive and expensive. I had a second-hand valve one to start with. Today you can buy or build one from a kit. It won’t be state of the art but it will give you no end of information you can’t get from a circuit any other way. I know lots of serious electronic enthusiasts will say these cheap ones are toys and I can see their point but, having one of them is better than having nothing like it at all. Way better.
Oscilloscope kits
I built one from a kit as an experiment But I was amazed to find out it worked pretty well for 90% of the circuits I was building. Yes, it’s nice to have a £300 machine but don’t dismiss these as pointless toys. If you’re starting out one of these will provide you with the ability to check working circuits.
An oscilloscope is a bit like a stethoscope is to a doctor. You can connect the probe to parts of the circuits and see what’s happening inside.
I built a 555 timer flashing an LED circuit. It didn’t work, but I used my cheap oscilloscope. I just put the probe on the output of the 555 trimer (pin 3) and the output was switching between high and low, as it should.
So the 555 timer circuit was working as it should. The only other thing was the LED and the resistor. A quick, swapping of the LED around had it all working. The LED was the wrong way around! The oscilloscope confirmed to me that the circuit was working perfectly and there was some other reason why the LED wasn’t lighting.
Even a cheap kit oscilloscope can tell you a lot about a circuit. In reality, it’s perfectly fine for most circuits even audio frequency ones. I just noticed that on the sidebar on YouTube, one of the videos that have popped up is “How I fixed my Technics amp with a £20 oscilloscope, so I’m not the only one who’s found you can do lots with one of these.
Soldering
It’s almost inevitable that once you start building electronic circuits on a breadboard, it won’t be long before you want to solder. Especially when you realise how cheap and easy it is and how you can make your circuits permanent. Or as permanent as you want them to be.
The next logical stage from building circuits on breadboards is to build them on a stripboard or veroboard as it is also known. I say logical because these stripboard layouts also feature lines the breadboards do. You can even get a strip board that exactly copies the layout of a breadboard so you can simply take a component out and solder it in the same location on the strip board as it was on the breadboard.
Even if you don’t use these types of boards it’s not too difficult to rearrange the circuit to go on a strip board.
There is software that will help you with your layout but if you want to do it yourself have a look at my guides
Soldering is something that is simple to do. You just need the know-how and the practice. This can be learned using old components and strip boards. You can probably reuse both afterwards. You will need a soldering iron or a solder station.
Choosing these is a topic on its own. I’ve covered this before so it won’t go into it again here. You’ll also need a stand for the iron if that’s what you choose. A soldering station will usually have some form of stand built in.
Things to make soldering easier
There are also a few accessories that although not essential will certainly make the job easier and for the cost, you’ll wish you’d bought them in the first place if you put off the purchase.
Firstly you must get a proper stand if you get a soldering iron. Apart from the fact that you’ll give yourself a nasty burn if you happen to touch the iron accidentally or knock it over onto yourself, you will probably find that you’ll do more damage to your surroundings. I wasn’t Mr popular when my soldering iron fell onto the carpet. I only noticed after I detected a weird smell! Just get a stand there are some good ones around few a few pounds. A lot cheaper than a carpet.
You should also get a bench mat. These will protect tables if your workspace doubles as the kitchen table. The one I use is made of silicon. So not only is it heat and solder resistant it also provides a nice smooth surface for PCBs. It also has compartments to keep your screws and components from rolling around.
A helping hand is one of the most useful accessories while you solder. There’s always an occasion when you need to hold these things at the same time. They’re also great for holding objects and cables from moving while you solder them.
Solder tip cleaners with brass shavings are great as you don’t have to keep them wet as you do with a sponge and a tub of flux will cost a few pounds and last years and are invaluable for difficult soldering jobs and most unsolder jobs, which brings me nicely on to desoldering.
De soldering
Once you’ve learned how to solder you’ll inevitably solder something in the wrong place so you’ll have to get it out.
This task is called de soldering and is an art form in itself. It’s such a large subject with its different techniques and tools that it has a guide all of its own. There is one thing that I’ll add though and that’s after years of de soldering I’ve found one tool that is head and shoulders above everything else. Even stuff costing lots more.
