Building Circuits in Lab
- Two brief descriptions of breadboards and how to use them to build circuits: 1, 2.
- Fritzing is free software that aids in the design of electronic circuits. Among many other features, it has a tool for laying out circuits on a breadboard, letting you work out a good layout for a design before wiring it up in the lab.
Drawing Circuits
I highly recommend using a vector graphics editor (such as Inkscape, which is free, open-source, cross-platform and excellent) as opposed to a raster editor (like MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop). Vector graphics will let you copy, move, and generally edit your circuit with far more flexibility than a raster graphics program can.
Additionally, there are several programs focused on schematic capture (drawing circuit diagrams) directly. A few free options are:
- TinyCAD — Use the "File > Export as image file..." function to get an image you can use in your lab report. Crop the image to only include the circuit in your lab report and avoid wasting space.
- Fritzing — As mentioned above, this could be quite useful for planning breadboard layouts of your circuits before building them. It has a circuit schematic mode that can produce clean circuit schematics (with simple image export functionality) as well.
- KiCad
- QUCS — Windows and Mac OS X binaries are available here
TinyCAD is probably the best option of these, but feel free to try out the others as well.
Concepts
- The Binary Number System — a very quick explanation of how binary numbers work, including fractions. There's a slightly longer explanation from a different perspective here.
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