Re: Electronics Education for Dummies

Math: I forgot to mention this. You really don't need to know much math. If you have a good calculator (your computer probably has a good one, or you can download one), you might not even have to buy a physical calculator. Until you get into the REAL REAL ethereal stuff, like designing toroid inductors, for example, all you really need to know how to do is multiply and divide and square. No higher level of math will be needed for many many years, if ever. If you end up reading texts that have calculus, or other very advanced math, you are reading...

Re: Electronics Education for Dummies

The posters' question is a good one and interesting one. I went to electronics school around 1980. Each course had one textbook of course. I found that having multiple texts that covered any given subject helped a lot. In other words, I bought a LOT of extra reference books and other books that covered the subject of the specific class.

Of course, this was all pre-internet. So, anytime I wanted to expand my knowledge, I had to spend money on books. I've spent many thousands over the years.

BUT, now that we have the...

I remember Time Constant theory from my Electronics courses 30 years ago.

I have been reading badcaps for a few days now.

I'm not yet understanding much about ESR yet, but I do understand capacitance.

This might be a really dumb question, but assuming a person had virtually NO money to spend on any new test equipment, for out of circuit capacitor testing, would a series resistor and a stopwatch (and good quality DMM) not be enough to make a "rough" measurement of a capacitor? I mean, using the 5 Time Constant principle?

If...