Electrics/Electronics

[The Heretic]

Hi All, anyone on here into electrics/electronics? I'm a complete newbie to it all but if I had to do my career choices all over again I'd definitely be an electrician or come kind of electronics engineer, so I've taken my first tentative steps into it all, bought a few books, got a breadboard, multi-meter, resistors, LEDs, etc etc. I've made a small circuit which lit up an LED, well fuck me it was like the first time I saw a real life fanny or my first "Hello World" written in C, what a buzz!!

Where this will go I'm not sure, I'd like to hope I would be able to troubleshoot basic electronic issues some day without electrocuting myself but that's way down the line, I have 2 guitar amplifiers that don't work so If I could figure out whats happening there eventually..

I know there are few people on here who make the own pedals etc, I'm assuming that you would have done a college courses or did you just pick it all up as hobbyists over time?

[The Heretic]

double post

[ochoill]

I wish I had studied electronics years ago.  Have been building pedals for about six years now slowly, taught myself everything from reading constantly online, and a lot of trial and error.  Couldn't even give a specific place to start, I would look up all sorts of sites and videos in the start to get an understanding of it.  Knew about schematics a bit going in at least from a failed college year in Bolton St DIT but bar knowing what the parts were I was lost.

Anyway countless kits and builds and so on and now I can do most sorts of pedal builds, understand the process and what is going on, and can design my own schematics and PCBs from scratch - but still have absolutely heaps to learn about everything.  Anyway I love it, love putting on an album and sitting down to work on a build, whether it is purely breadboard design stage or putting together PCBs, it's a great auld buzz.

[The Heretic]

I've been following you tube videos and have some books and going between both to fill in where the penny doesn't quite drop. What's been wrecking my head is trying to figure out where a resistor goes on a basic circuit which lights up an LED, battery-resistor-LED, some say the positive side some say the negative side, some say it doesn't matter where it goes either before or after the LED. For me it makes sense to have it on the negative side as the current flows from negative to positive, I'm just trying to figure out whats good solid design principles, I'm kinda nerdy that way...