3. BASIC ELECTRONICS

Now that you have a general background in electricity and moving charges you can move on to learning more about basic electronics.  Electronics puts a knowledge of electricity to useful work.  Electronics applies electrical current flow of electrical charges to circuits to accomplish specific tasks.  Amplifiers can be constructed from glass "tubes" containing metal elements, or more commonly today with solid state diodes, transistors, or integrated circuits.   An amplifier is simply a device or circuit that takes a small signal input and controls a larger current as it output.  The input signal voltage is small and the output voltage is larger - amplified.  A circuit containing wire conductors, resistors, capacitors, inductors and amplifiers can be configured in many ways to build various electronic circuits like oscillators, digital logic circuits, computer circuits, television and video circuits and much more.  An oscillator by the way is just an amplifier with some of the output fed back into the input.  Sounds like a perpetual motion machine but it isn't as the amplifiers power supply is providing the additional energy that is lost in the circuit and keeps the circulation, i.e. oscillations going.

Basic electronics is all about electrical components and the circuits consisting of those components .  Common components are resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors, and integrated circuits.  You will find each of these components described in detail in the following numbered sections.  The components are interconnect with conductors, either physical wires or printed circuits.  The components make up linear analog amplifiers, oscillators, and filters as examples.  They also can be configured to create digital logic circuits such as memories, gates, arithmetic units, and central processing units.  So you will find basic electronics in every computer, mp3 player, radio, TV and may other appliances in your home, car, or on your body.  Each circuit has a job. Components are interconnected to perform a specific task.  First learn about each individual component and how it works then learn about how to interconnect them to make useful end products. Continue your study by reading the numbered sections to follow.