Make: Electronics

The first edition of Make: Electronics established a new benchmark for introductory texts. The second edition enhanced that experience, and now this third edition includes all-new diagrams throughout, new photographs, and completely rewritten text.

Learning by Discovery is a system developed by Charles Platt to enable an experience that is fascinating, fun, and memorable. You learn by building your own circuits–and by making your own mistakes.

In fact, mistakes are an important part of the experience. The book encourages you to “burn things out and mess things up” to find out for yourself the limits of electronic components. You’ll blow a fuse and watch an overloaded LED, and you can cut open a relay to see how it works inside.

Affordable Component Kits are available from independent suppliers (on Amazon), or the book explains how to shop online yourself.

Illustrations are in full color throughout, so you’ll see exactly what you need and how to use it.

While Make: Electronics minimizes the amount of theory that you need, it does show you how to figure out Ohm’s Law and do the simple math to calculate the time constant of a capacitor.

A buying guide shows basic tools ranging from pliers to a low cost multimeter. A simple “finger test” demonstrates how transistors switch or amplify current. You can solder wires, if you wish, to build a permanent circuit, although soldering is not necessary to build all the circuits in the book.

You’ll see how to use integrated circuit chips to create a simple circuit that tests the speed of your reflexes. Other circuits include a combination lock for a computer, or a game in which players compete to be the first to press a button. 

All the basic concepts are demonstrated quickly and simply with affordable components. You’ll discover resistance, capacitance, voltage, amperage, inductance, and the relationship between electricity and magnetism.

Ideal for Beginners

This book assumes that you have no prior knowledge. It explains each concept in meticulous detail, and is friendly, patient, and fun. Positive reader feedback has been received from people ranging in age from 8 to 84. If you only buy one book about electronics, this should be the one.

Table of Contents

Section One: The Basics

Experiment 1: Taste the Power!

Experiment 2: Go with the Flow

Experiment 3: Applying Pressure

Experiment 4: Heat and Power

Experiment 5: Let’s Make a Battery

Section Two: Switching

Experiment 6: Getting Connected

Experiment 7: Investigating a Relay

Experiment 8: A Relay Oscillator

Experiment 9: Time and Capacitors

Experiment 10: Transistor Switching

Experiment 11: Light and Sound

Section Three: Soldering

Experiment 12: Joining Two Wires Together

Experiment 13: Roasting an LED

Experiment 14: A Wearable Multivibrator

Section Four: Chips, Ahoy!

Experiment 15: Emitting a Pulse

Experiment 16: Set Your Tone

Experiment 17: An Alarming Idea

Experiment 18: Reflex Tester

Experiment 19: Learning Logic

Experiment 20: The Unlocker

Experiment 21: The Button Blocker

Experiment 22: Flipping and Bouncing

Experiment 23: Nice Dice

Section Five: What Next?

Experiment 24: Magnetism

Experiment 25: Tabletop Power Generation

Experiment 26: Speaker Destruction

Experiment 27: Making a Coil React

Experiment 28: One Radio, No Solder,No Power

Experiment 29: Hardware Meets Software

Experiment 30: Nicer Dice

Chapter 31: The Learning Process

Appendix A: Specifications

Appendix B: Sources

About the Author

Charles Platt is a contributing editor and regular columnist for Make: magazine, where he writes about electronics and tools. Platt was a senior writer for Wired magazine, has written various computer books, and has been fascinated by electronics since he put together a telephone answering machine from a tape recorder and military-surplus relays at age 15. He lives in a Northern Arizona wilderness area, where he has his own workshop for prototype fabrication and the projects that he writes about for Make: magazine.