Talk:Electronics

Vision, Mission, Scope & Concept
I took the liberty to insert this as a new topic at the beginning of this discussion page, although the topic is not new. I am badly missing an "authoritative" definition of the scope and concept of this book. Such information should be first on this discussion page - where you now read this question - and probably at the book's start page, too.

Would someone please step forward, grasp the authority, appoint himself/herself as the leader (at least for a day), and define the principles for the contents of this book? I am not asking for yet another scope, TOC, whatever discussion. I am asking for a decision, definition, "final answer", consensus, which IMHO is badly needed as the basis for the work:


 * Type of the book? Reference, textbook, self-study course, (application) note collection, tutorial, experiment instructions, etc.?
 * What difficulty level? Beginner, intermediate, advanced level? And
 * level for whom? Hobbyist, professional, college, universiy, scientist? (an advanced level for a hobbyist is something completely different than one for university).
 * What scope? Where to start? Where to end?

Publish this information here, so people can decide if this is the right book they want/can contribute to, or that they should probably do another book.

Please, DON'T DISCUSS, please DECIDE.

'Can anyone Include/Make a "Massive Printable Version" link? I know know much about how Wikimedia works, but I would like to print this out.'

85.72.139.207 10:58, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Archive
Because of their length, the previous discussions on this page have been archived. If further archiving is needed, see How to archive a talk page.

Previous discussions:


 * Archive 1 (March 2004 to June 2005):


 * Archive
 * Foreword
 * Contributing [to this book]
 * Table of Contents [for each page]
 * TOC [same]
 * Scope of Book
 * Depth of mathematics
 * Circuit template [circuit diagrams]
 * Quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics
 * A Crossroads [Scope of the book]
 * Unusual circuit visualizations
 * People whining about how bad their physics/electronics textbook is

''I was a bit liberal with the archiving. The same dicussions seem to be neverending, though. Just cut and paste a particular comment from the archive if you want to reply to it. - Omegatron 17:06, 21 July 2005 (UTC)''

Images for deletion
Note to admins: We had some trouble with uploading images, feel free to delete the orphan images.


 * What images specifically? - Omegatron 16:56, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

People working on this book
Name: Goals. What you are working on? Any requests?

Wanderer: I am currently working on the background for this book at Physics in English.

Omegatron: I always wanted to learn electronics when I was a little kid, but none of the books I read provided me with consistent, understandable, correct information. In sixth grade we covered Ohm's law and I was dismayed when my teacher said I would have to wait til college to learn the rest. :-) Now I have my bachelor's in electrical engineering and I want to help write something that is clear and correct.  You shouldn't HAVE to wait til college if you are interested in something enough...  On the other hand, I'm one of the people who adds calculus equations.  :-)  We'll sort it all out eventually...  I also make diagrams using klunky schematic drawer, which I have modified and advertise prominently despite not really caring if you use it. I just like it. See Electronics/Template for the modified (improved?) version.

Theresa knott :I wrote the GCSE electricity book. I don't know a great deal about electronics, but I do know physics. I intend to copy edit, correct physics misconceptions and the like. I am also resonably adept at drawing diagrams. Let me know if there is anything you want drawn.

maxpower: Working on a BS.EE. Suffered through some awful textbooks, want to give something back and help with a simpler, more concise electronics/circuits text. Working on filling in the gaps rather than editing, for the most part.

DavidCary: There's tons of fun electronics stuff that a high-schooler could afford to buy all the parts, and understand well enough to *build*. I'd like this book to inspire people to *build* stuff rather than think this is some sort of "rocket science". I have a BS.EE., so I've also suffered through confusing, misleading explanations. There was no reason for me to suffer through learning Laplace Transforms before building my first simple blinky-light. I'm still trying to really understand Maxwell's equations and how they relate to special relativity.

H Padleckas: I added the Section Voltage, Current, and Power to the Chapter module Basic Concepts in the Electronics book. Up till now, the Chapter stood there pretty much empty. A previous attempt tried to describe Voltage in terms of Coulomb's Law and Electric Field but was too mathematical and apparently not used. I'm thinking of moving the Charge and Coulomb's Law section to the beginning chapter and replacing the glossary in the Introductory chapter or merging it with Definitions. The glossary now stands at the beginning as an un-numbered module. I have almost finished writing* and made the Electronics/Charge and Coulomb's Law section previously in Basic Concepts its own separate module as the first ordered module in the book. I made Basic Concepts redirect to Voltage, Current, and Power which I plan to polish up. I also copied most of the content in the sections on Coulomb's Law and Electric Field into an empty module in Modern Physics called Coulomb's Law and Electric Field.


 * I only wrote the last two sections in that module. Other members wrote all previous sections.H Padleckas

Yossarian : I am currently in an Electronics Engineering MSc, and would like to help out if I can. I like what I am hearing here on the talk page about more how-to elements, and possibly the best way to get people started would be a tutorial in electronics EDA (preferrably open source) to allow people who might not have the equiptment have a play around with circuits. I wrote some of the stuff on basic gates, and am continuing to work on the digital circuits section.

Sraevsky I have a BSEE, and I am interested in putting a little time into this book. We'll see what happens, though. Right now I'm very busy trying to finish up a law degree.

Filip Dominec: I would like to
 * 1) help writing text and synchronize it with the czech project at http://cs.wikibooks.org/
 * 2) upload some electronic diagrams to Commons
 * 3) change the main page to something like

Pdavis68 I'm interested in vacuum tube amps as a hobby. I'm going to try to fatten up the section on tube electronics a bit.

Thanks

 * To those who have contributed to Wikipedia, as large parts of this book are base on the things they have written.


 * Theresa Knott, who wrote the GCSE Science book.


 * The maker of Klunky, the ever useful circuit diagram maker.


 * Everyone who has contributed to this book.

GCSE Electricity
If someone could help merge the basic GCSE electricity textbook parts into here, it would be GREATLY appreciated.


 * Where is that? - Omegatron


 * It is right here: GCSE Science/Electricity - Omegatron

So, we're moving everything from GCSE Science/Electricity to Electronics ?

So Electronics is just one chapter in the GCSE_Science book ? So I can move stuff back and forth until I find a place that "fits", and delete redundancies between them ? -- DavidCary 03:58, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

What about FHSST_Physics_Electrostatics:Charge ?

huh Kiogora95 (discuss • contribs) 15:49, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Common Misconceptions
I will list these here. Feel free to add to them. I want to put little marks next to each one when it has been covered in the book. Or we can make uncovered ones bold or something

also these: http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html
 * Direction of current flow
 * electron current vs. conventional current
 * charge carriers, holes, etc. etc. etc.
 * I thought in terms of electron flow because I thought it was more "correct". But in reality neither is "correct" (current flow in salt water for example) and conventional current is much easier to think in terms of, precisely because it is the convention.
 * voltage and current have polarity, not just magnitude
 * Fundamental ideas of voltage,
 * current,
 * resistance [[Image:100%.png]]
 * (water pipe analogies? pressure, flow, constriction etc.)
 * "voltage" is a useful myth, but it is not single-valued in a changing magnetic field. I wonder if it would make things easier to understand if we explain stuff in terms of real, measurable quantities such as "electrons" and "electric field".
 * Speed of electron drift vs electric fields and waves (speed and motion of electrons themselves, speed of a signal is not actually the speed of light, electrons don't travel at the speed of light down the wires and back)
 * I thought capacitors charged up until dielectric breakdown, and that this was normal. I thought this was the principle behind timer circuits.  this is more like a spark gap.
 * capacitors only charge up to the voltage supplying them.
 * I figured out that RC circuits had something to do with timers but I couldn't figure out how
 * Transistor is like a resistor that changes value with an input. i read that a transistor is an amplifier and that didn't make any sense to me.  i never grasped it.
 * I didn't understand transistors, but i understood "thyristors" as the electronic switches I wanted to use, even though a transistor can be used as a switch quite easily. transistors were not explained very well.
 * I was intimidated by ICs and basically ignored their existence. i think becuase they didnt explain how a transistor was actually made, and how it could be expanded to a darlington transistor, and then to a chip with lots of transistors on one piece of silicon.
 * digital logic was not explained well at all. logic levels are specific voltages within a certain range, open outputs, pull up resistors, etc.
 * idealized circuit diagrams vs circuit layout diagrams (battery symbol vs perfect voltage source with source resistance)
 * I moved the 'Decoder and Encoders' to 'Digital to Analog & Analog to Digital Converters' as the description did matches these devices instead of the all digital devices that decoders/encoders are. Unfortunately I am still figuring out editing here so I was unable to add a description for those devices.

Combine topics?
It seems that there are too many topics in the TOC. Do resistors, inductors and capacitors really have to be separate topics? Can't we merge some topics, especially under DC electronics?

--Extro


 * I think they should be separate topics. Just my opinion. - Omegatron


 * I'd have to agree. It's good to keep the book modular like this so people won't have to dig around much to find what they're looking for. Besides, capacitors, resistors and inductors are some pretty important and widely used components. - Alex S


 * I disagree. I suspect it's easier to understand the differences between what capacitors do and what inductors do if you put them all on the same page -- otherwise the reader has to flip back and forth to see the subtle differences between RC circuits and RL circuits. --DavidCary 18:14, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree about capacitors and inductors, and other duals. :-) - Omegatron 18:17, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Another electronics wiki
Another electronics wiki: http://electronicschat.org/echatwiki/ This link dead Aug 22, 2008, if it's still dead in a few months, delete it...

Focus of this book
This is basically turning into a shoddy mirror of various Wikipedia articles. We need to develop a sort of "What the Electronics wikibook is not" to focus people towards writing useful information. I don't see why we can't link to the appropriate wikipedia article for each component/section instead of parroting it here, so the reader can look there for detailed information. Then we can focus on the how to aspects of electronics, which isn't covered in wikipedia and is the point of this book. The book is to teach you basic electrical engineering: how to design and build electronic circuits, not to describe the physics behind them in depth or various bleeding-edge technologies. That's what encyclopedia articles are for. The wikibook should have more how-to, more examples, more teaching, and less barely-related information. - Omegatron 18:43, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree to some degree but the point of an Electronics is an explanation of how circuits work. For instance, may be this is a once off case, the Op Amps article at wikipedia is nothing short of superb but it does not cover the analysis of Op Amps that an Electronics text book would.  Things like mesh  and nodal analysis, superposition theorem aren't covered either.  Ok Diagnostic Equipment or Measuring Instruments, which incidentally appears to be a mirrored page, should in all likelihood be just be links unless some of the information is more important.  But I think virtually the rest should probably be left because the purpose of this book is more different to an encyclopedia, an encyclopedia what it is.  This text book explains how it is used.  Which now that I've said it appears to be supporting you, but wikipedia is often at a quite a high level.  A level that might be too high for this text book. -IKnowNothing 11:40, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree. Op-amps are a huge subject, and most of the wikipedia information should be included in this book.  But we need to cover a lot more about them.  I'm talking more about stuff like Electronics/Resistors. ( Not that I think it should be deleted, but we should be focusing on more practical stuff.) - Omegatron


 * That belongs in a Electrical circuits book but is too low level for an Electronics book. So yes it properly shouldn't be deleted. --IKnowNothing 22:04, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Now that I've written that. I agree that we need to focus on more how to, more examples. The only problem is that wikipedia, the wikipedia article sometimes have too much information. Is this a digital or analog electronics text book?  --IKnowNothing 11:40, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * It's an introduction to both. I think we should remove the stubby modules about things like Electronics/ALUs to the talk page until we have finished the basics like Ohm's law.  Let's finish what we have before we start adding all kinds of advanced subjects. - Omegatron 13:36, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree that we should finish the lower level stuff before carrying on. But what level of completion is required?  75%, 50% and in whose opinion?  Another Question is: does nodal and mesh analysis matter, It is definitely a part of Electrical circuits theory and I could write it after some revision but it is seldom used in Electronics.  More often a less complete more directed analysis is done of electrical circuits. Someone has to assess the development stages.  I also agree that the stubby pages can be removed to the talk pages.--IKnowNothing 22:04, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Separate issue how should the Diagnostic Equipment and Electronics/Measuring Instruments be consolidated. Just a deletion of the less informative one or an integration of the information. --IKnowNothing 22:04, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In order to get a more functional textbook like 'feel' to this. I think a worthwhile addition would be a section containing real functional curciut designs starting at a basic level and moving onto more advanced circuit. For example, the first section could be "A voltage regulator". This would contain a circuit diagram, an etching pattern, an explanation of how and why it works. As well as an explanation of any unusual/ambiguous configurations. --I don't have an account yet (KronicD).

Where to get circuit diagrams
Check here for pictures: commons:Category:Electrical_diagrams. Everything I have ever made (including the common base, etc. diagrams) is up there now, and there are tons of diagrams I didn't make. If you are thinking of a diagram, there is probably one there already.

You can make a link to them and they will be transwikied automatically:



- Omegatron 20:06, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Where to get components for drawing circuit diagrams


You can use components from this image:



It is intended to make drawing of schematics simple, fast and still very flexible, using common vector image editors (as Inkscape).

All components are snapped to 1 mm grid (turn on "node snapping"). Feel free to edit and replace with new version. --Filip Dominec 13:12, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Merging LearnElectronics
since the aim of both books is the same I'm supposed to merge my book with this one, however as it is hands on and simplistic I don't see how i can merge it with this one. I want the reader to be able to start creating there own electronics very quickly and i only go over basic thoery and equations (Ohm's law and power=volts*current), your book goes over advanced theories and equations that i feel the reader doesn't need to know about when they first start.

does anyone agree with reordering this book so learnelectronics can fit without a lot of advanced talk?


 * V2os has started the book called LearnElectronics (or at least contributed to it). I added a merge tag to the book, because it appeared to have similar aims to that of Electronics. After some discussion, I decided to remove the tag for the time being. But, it would be great if contributes to this book would provide some guidance, so that we can ensure that duplication of material is kept to a minimum. Maybe the addition links between the two books would help. (Donovan|Geocachernemesis|Interact) 05:42, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

I guess we should somehow link both books close together. However I'm not sure if a merge would be the best way. IMHO learn electronics would be aimed at a high school level, while this book is more of a college level book. Perhaps we can get both books to interface with eachother so that learnElectronics would be the beginners introduction to electronics and this book would follow up as a more indepth study? --Patrik 15:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I think the books should be merged. I don't like multiple projects with the same goals. Contribution to the Electronics book is patchy enough already. Also there's Electricity for introductory stuff.

I don't see any reason why we can't format this in a way that people can start building circuits without learning the advanced theory behind it. - Omegatron 16:19, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Deciding the desired scope of the book I think is the absolute biggest problem we have. On the one hand, some want a book that just tells how to build very simple light bulb and switch circuits with no theory at all. On the other hand, we had a contributor at one point that had an Analog Circuits chapter with subheadings Sound, Brief History of the Universe, The Solar System, Evolution of the Earth's Atmosphere, Earthquakes and natural disasters, and Global Warming.

The Wikipedia doesn't have this problem because it just breaks everything up into individual subjects instead of trying to wrap them up and present them in a teaching order. If you want details, you read other articles that have details. If you want basics, you just read article introductions.

I think the point of this Wikibook should be to focus on the practical "how-to" aspects that Wikipedia doesn't provide, and present the information in order. For theory, just link to Wikipedia articles.

On the other hand, I think it's important to know what the electron fluid is actually doing to be able to design circuits yourself instead of just building from schematics that are provided to you, which is why I was including the concepts of charge in the introductory chapter. I think it's important to think about the charge that flows between two electrostatically charged objects to really understand how it flows in a circuit. We don't need to include any equations for this part at all, but the descriptions I read when I was younger "dumbed it down" so much that I really didn't understand what was actually going on. I always tried to think of circuits in terms of electron flow instead of conventional current because "that's what's actually flowing!" It hampered my understanding a lot. (I see people do this online sometimes and it annoys me.)

I'm sure there's a way to present simple circuits that people can build without actually reading the text, while still providing useful information for people who want to read it, and defer all the advanced theory to the Wikipedia articles. - Omegatron 19:30, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

You could seperate each section so that the basic information needed for understanding is at the top under a "basic information for understanding" heading and then another heading saying "advanced understanding" after that --V2os 21:50, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

This is all talk and no action, getting really annoying.--V2os 17:01, 4 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, wikibooks is really slow. :-\ - Omegatron 03:13, 5 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm getting tired of trying to maintain the LearnElectronics wikibook as no one will post one experiment and it's getting to be a bunch of stuff that should be on wikipedia instead, with no instructions on how to make circuitry, do i have permission to "reorganize" this book until it can be used by high school level readers? order of a chapter would be "basic understanding" "hands on stuff" and "advanced understanding" seriously i'm considering putting LearnElectronics up for deletion or merging to this book. --V2os 22:23, 20 August 2005 (UTC)


 * If you think that will get the book back on track, be bold, you don't need to get permission. As Omegatron said, Wikibooks are really slow. You shouldn't be afraid of jumping in and getting your hands dirty, because explaining electronics to others is a good way of showing that you understand it yourself. Geo.T 03:31, 21 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree that this book could stand a serious reorganization, but I am worried about what you mean by "used by high school level readers." I would say that the book in it's current form is a bit heavy on the theory (most of the "charge and coulombs law" chapter for instance) but some theory would be very helpful.  I may have been a bit slow at the mathematics, but I did not understand much calculus in high school, but I would definately question the usefulness of this book if it didn't include basic equations to model capacitors, inductors, et cetera.  I think a good idea would be to divide each section into two parts, one which introduces the basic theory about the chapter, and another which explains some more hands-on material.  For example, when talking about capacitors, the theory section could give a quick rundown on how they work, and the equations that can be used to model them, whereas the hands-on section would have something like "here is an interesting circuit which helps you to understand how they work."  Another problem which I see with the current incarnation of the book is that people tend to ignore the prerequisites.  For example, the term "vector" is explained a number of times in this book, and often not very clearly.  However, in the prerequisites, it says that the book assumes an understanding of algebra, calculus, and geometry.  This book should not explain what a vector is, it should simply assume the knowledge, and provide a link for people who don't know or need a refresher.  It would be much more efficient if there was one place where people focused their efforts on explaining mathematics, and another place for electronics.  Not only does mixing them clutter up the electronics book, but it also does not provide as good of an explanation as a math section would.  Not to argue against myself, but a short appendix with some basic mathematical formulae mae be handy, but I would argue to leave the serious teaching of mathematics to another place.  Furthermore, I think that if the book is well written, it could be understood by someone who doesn't understand or doesn't care about the calculus involved, while still satisfying the curiosities of the more mathematically inclined.  It is just a matter of being clear on which sections are absolutely necessary, and which are the more "advanced" topics.  Sorry for the rant, but I think this book needs a clear direction.  I like the idea of having more hands-on material quite a bit, but I would argue against removing the theory.

What are the goals of this book (hands on experiments, mathematical theory, circuit analysis . . .)?

What math does the book assume of its reader (highschool math, calc, linear algebra, diff eq)?

What other knowledge does the book assume (basic physics . . .)?

What should the structure of the book be, in what order are things presented, and how can theory and application be kept separate, but still be meaningful and useful on their own?

(wow, sorry for the huge rant, but I have been going through this book and reading, sometimes tweaking, for a while now, and I have been thinking about a lot of places where I beleive it falls short. Hopefully I will have some more time to help out jim 02:00 (UTC) 23 Aug 2005)


 * I'm not going to read that entire thing right now, but now i've seen an electronics book, it starts with defining a battery in 2 sentences and putting some pictures of them up, then it does the same thing with resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc.. and multimeter + power supply +signal generator (ocilloscope too but that would be too expensive for beginners) just a few sentances and pictures of parts for the first section of the first chapter. THIS wikibook gives the reader equations for electrostatic charge (no one needs that for learning electronics and wether it should be in the book is questionable.) You may want to delete the first few chapters to the entire book. --V2os 23:24, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Currently, there are many wikibook "modules" in the "Electronic:" namespace. I agree with Omegatron that they are really outside the scope of an electronics book. But instead of deleting them, is there some other book (or even Wikipedia article) that we could move them to? --DavidCary 06:30, 10 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Electronics/Atmosphere
 * Electronics/Fuel Cell

EE bookshelf
I've recently started work on a number of books at the electrical engineering bookshelf. While many of these books will touch on the same topics as are covered in the Electronics book, i think that the EE books will have a much more limited scope, and a more well-defined target audience. In particular, These books so far are trying to be very "mathematically light", in contrast to some of the pages in this book which can be very equation-dense. Also, I am trying to lay out an entire EE "curriculum" of sorts, in the form of a natural progression of wikibooks that would follow an undergraduate curriculum in EE. I am not really interested in having all the books merged, because a gigantic, hold-all, monolithic book really defeats the purpose of having "bookshelves" at all. Let me know what everybody here thinks. --Whiteknight 22:31, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

A-to-D and D-to-A
The section "Encoding and Decoding" links to a discussion of A-to-D and D-to-A converters. Somebody also added a section title on the main page that is similar. This duplication needs to be resolved.

Orphaned pages
There is a lot of orphaned pages connected to this book:. Merge them here or mark with delete template. --Derbeth talk 13:59, 11 January 2006 (UTC)


 * As an update to this, I've gone through a few of these and marked those that are obvious forks of other material, but there are several pages which I couldn't find already as part of the book, and these need to either be linked or merged with the rest of the book (or deleted if it's a fork I missed). Those with (M) before the name should probably be merged into another page:
 * Electronics/Electric Field
 * Electronics/Frequency Spectrum
 * (M)Electronics/KCL
 * (M)Electronics/KVL
 * (M)Electronics/Mutual Inductance
 * Electronics/Power Conversion
 * Electronics/RCL time domain
 * (M)Electronics/Resonance
 * (M)Electronics/Spin
 * (M)Electronics/Superconductors


 * In addition, there's these two pages which I'm not sure at all what to do with:
 * Electronics/Urban Legends
 * Electronics/Humor


 * Xerol Oplan 22:16, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Three more:
 * Electronics/Conventional Current
 * Electronics/Table of Chemicals
 * Electronics/Charge
 * --hagindaz 01:12, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Another posibility for the scope of this book.
In my opinion, Wikibooks needs separate books on the following:


 * Basic Electronics (to GCSE/16 year old level), so Ohm's Law, etc.
 * Advanced Electronics or Theoretical Electronics, which takes there reader from the end of Basic Electronics to an advanced level, detailing all the theory needed the understand it (or we have Electronics (quite detailed) and "Advanced Electronics" (very detailed), which I think would be clumsy). This would be quite equation heavy, but could have lighter "in brief" pages, perhaps.
 * History of Electronics, from rubbing amber with a cloth to computers. This could also include how electronics products are made (might need a different name).
 * Practical Electronics, which is how to make circuit work, which IC to use for what, how to solder and lay out a PCB, etc.
 * Electronics Data, containing useful tables and the like applicabe to all the above. Perhaps also a dictionary of electronics and an index for all the above. Maybe "Electronics" could be like an electronics bookshelf, pointing the way to all the above books.


 * Although it looks like Electric Circuits does this already


 * Inductiveload 09:22, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

This way, every reader has access to material that they can understand and use. Otherwise we risk losing usefulness for one end of the spectrum or the other.

Along with specialised books like Semiconductors, Electromagnetics, etc, this should give a broad AND in-depth electronics resource.


 * That sounds great. I agree that there's no need to put everything electronic in one big book -- separate books on the above topics is a good idea.
 * And Subject: Electrical engineering/Descriptions (formerly Electric Circuits ) looks like a nice overview of all the books we have so far on the subject.
 * On the other hand, when I read through the roughly 30 books in Subject: Electrical engineering and the roughly 25 books in its sub-Subject Subject:Computer engineering (some books are in both lists), I suspect that many of those books should be merged together, since the topics and the audience heavily overlap. --DavidCary (discuss • contribs) 02:15, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Merging Electric Motors
I am against this merge, becasue motors have very little to do with Electronics - they are Electrical devcies. I know it is a small distinction, but it it like computers vs. hoovers. If motors have to be merged with anything (which I oppose, as motors is a very broad subject and can be expanded to a large size anyway - think of all the different types and what would happen if we made a REALLY thoughough examination of how they work from the most physical level) it should be Electromagnetics.

Motor Controller Circuits on the other hand belong either here or in Practical Electronics. Inductiveload 09:14, 15 September 2006 (UTC) (forgot to log in the first time)

Iam also against the idea of merging Electrical machines with Electronics.. Let us have these topics under a hierarchial tree. As there are so many topics in electrical engg, let us have a detailed descibtion about these topics. --Wascool

I am neither in favour of merging the two nor in support of merging the two but i would like to point out that all electronics engineers are required to have some basic idea of electric machines because they are the final objects which are controlled. It might seem a bit redundant to many whose primary objectives are vlsi or chip oriented. But the point remained that wikibooks are supposed to help students and all electronic engineering students need to study electrical machines so it wouldnt be of much harm if the topic is merged those who dont want to read can skip it.

No Merging
Electronics is the study of flow of electrons in some material. Please don't merge it with Electrical Machines.

Conclusion of knowledge
What do we know ? So it looks like motors do have characteristics of electronic parts and should also be treated as.
 * Motors - and however any electromechanical device - can be driven and controlled by electronic circuits.
 * Motors can be used to cool down electronic circuits.
 * Motors can contain electronic circuits.
 * Motors can be a part of electronic circuits.
 * Motors do work trough electromagnetic fields. There are electrical fields and flows of electrons causing magnetic fields which are creating the * rotation effect and so on.
 * Electronic parts can be influenced by electromagnetic fields. A motor in fact can be used to erase the contents of a electronic memory ...
 * Electron flows through Motors are influenced and affected by the inductivity and other things like the rotation speed, the rotation strength and more.
 * Electronic circuits can have influences to motors and vice versa.

'''In fact a electronic circuit is nothing else than e small electrical machine. It is something that has a physical effect by applying a electrical current through it.'''

New design of the main page?
What about copying the design from the-same-but-czech project at ? --Filip Dominec 17:33, 29 January 2007 (UTC) As an electrical engineering graduate and electronics engineering postgraduate with a combined proffessional experience of almost 30 years, I am against this merger, and would suggest a separate line of books on electrical power engineering covering topics such as, electromagnetics, DC machines (generators and motors), AC machines (synchronous and asysnchronous), three phase circuits and machines, transformers, real / reactive power, electrical power generation/ transmission/ distribution, cables, lighting, circuit breakers and ohter switchgear, power electronics/rectifier/invertor/ VFVV drives and much more

Electronics/transistor|chapter 4
Trasistor appears the same in both chapters, chapter 4 and elements of Digital Circuits. I suggest removing the Chapter 4.--Sommacal Alfonso (talk) 18:18, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Batteries and Cells
There are both Electronics/Batteries and Electronics/Cells. There is a link fron this page to the cells but not to the batteries but the batteries page seems more complete. What is the system of organisation here? Storeye (talk) 08:15, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

LTSpice screens
I asked the people on commons about using screenshots from LTSpice, but they didn't have too much knowledge of the subject.

What are the rules here? If I cannot submit a screen from LTSpice, what am I to do? I could export the plot data, and use GNU plot, but that feels more like a workaround than the ethical solution. 24.11.191.100 (talk) 04:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't Linear be the right party to ask? They own LTSpice, and if they allow you to put screenshots from LTspice  showing your own circuits under the GNU Free Documentation License wouldn't that be ok? An alternative would be to use free software like gEDA's gscheme together with ngspice. However that isn't a very convenient solution.

Chapter One name?
I noticed the heading for chapter one was missing from the ToC and put it back:

Does anyone remember the name of the chapter?

-- hypergeek14 (talk) 21:41, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * As you can see in this old revision, the title was "DC Circuits". I've added that back in. -- Adrignola talk contribs 22:24, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Chapter 2, Section four: Name Change
What do you all think of changing the Steady State section of chapter two to Phasor Analysis? I think it would be great to have a section dedicated to phasor analysis after the audience has reviewed the phasors and impedence chapters. Eng20 (talk) 23:25, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Lesson 1.7 Needs Simplification
I feel that the inductance formulas are largely unnecessary for lesson 1.7. It's starting to look less beginner-friendly to introductory students in EE. Jimli536 (discuss • contribs) 16:34, 16 October 2016 (UTC)