a new trick: Electronics

One thing I’ve been putting off for years was learning electronics. Like everything else, I’m not immediately good at it, but I think with persistence I’ll learn the basics and hopefully become competent.

I picked up an Electronics Demystified book about 3 months ago and read the first chapter; I decided to put off reading more until I had a chance to get my 130 in one electronics kit that I got when I was younger. Now that I’ve got the kit, I’ve started reading again- I’m almost halfway through, although the retention rate is about 5%. Once I’m done I’m going to go back through the book and take a lot of notes.

The end goal to all of this is I want to make my own guitar pedals.

in a month or so I plan on picking up a nice bread board and some components and putting together a simple Fuzz pedal. I’ve started collecting interesting simple schematics- finding things that will be easy to make.

Finding good programs for linux has been interesting as well. I found a schema creator called gschem which seems to be the leader of the pack so far- it’s still a bit clunky, but it’s usable. As I make breakthroughs in my studies I’ll post them to the blog.