Learming New Skills - Electronics

Learning about electronics is a very useful skill to learn as nearly everything from a cheap toaster to your washing machine is controlled to some degree by electronics and in many cases you can replace a single defective component yourself, which in many cases you can obtain locally from an electronics supplier for pennies.

Most electronically controlled devices contain the cheapest circuits and components which are designed to do a job and when they fail the manufacturers expect you to scrap an item and replace it for a new item so they can bolster their profits and they do this by making spares available such as complete circuit boards at highly inflated prices so they deter you from repairing items and if the deterrent doesn't work they still profit from you by buying their complete circuit boards when you only need a single item on that circuit board to be replaced. In many cases every single item on a circuit board is readily available and with the power of the internet you can look these individual items up and all you need to repair them is a good eye, or a good magnifying glass, a soldering iron suitable for electronics, and some solder.

People often become confused by individual components and how they work but many online companies and individuals produce excellent videos on the basics of electronics and what each individual component does and how it works; there are also videos and downloads as well as books for beginners. When many people get into electronics they realise it is much easier than they thought and when they begin to understand electronic components they begin to make simple circuits and make some mistakes and learn from them for the future and enhance their knowledge and experience, or they take something with a known problem and unlike most people they have the knowledge to replace a dodgy or marginal item with an improved or uprated item to prevent the problem from occuring.

Many people make their own basic testing tools and while they may cost several £££££'s in a shop they make their own from spare or even recycled circuit boards they have by disassembling them for individual components and recycling these components into something useful for them. Many people make up simple things such as LED torches or lighting and if you have something such as a wind or water turbine you can even make your own charging regulators to monitor each individual battery in a bank of batteries, or by buying the individual charge regulator chips for about 50p each you can make your own battery chargers for rechargeable batteries with full overcharge protection to charge individual cells instead of having to charge a pair of cells in a commercial battery charger.

Electronics have a lot of calculations and many of these are very simple maths and you only need the formula and a calculator to do them, or many sites exist online for free where you simply enter the details into them and it does the calculations for you, so not prohibitive at all, and certainly not something to be scared of. You can make your home more efficient by replacing many high power mains items such as the halogen security lights with LED items by removing the halogen tube and fitting an LED chip and driver (the driver reduces the voltage and current) for less than £2.50, it may not be as bright as the original 500watt version but its not far short and does the job.
My mother is knocking on a bit now, and while she is still reasonably fit she is still on her own since losing my father and I made her a a set of LED lights formed into zones around her property, it was taken one step further with the addition of remote control, as she pulls up on her driveway she hits the right button and that zone is switched on, hit them all and everything is switched on, she keeps a remote control in the kitchen, a remote control in the bedroom, and another remote control in the car so all avenues are covered. In addition all her outside buildings lights were wired into her alarm, if anyone tries to break into her garage or summer house it sets the alarm off in silent mode and turns on all the lights in that vicinity and if I can learn to do this stuff, anyone can.

What happens if the power goes off? a reasonable question, but it all runs off 12 volts and this is provided by a micro wind turbine powering a large deep cycle battery so in the event of a mains failure everything works, what if the wind turbine doesn't provide sufficient charge for the battery? it does, but it also has a monitoring system which switches to a mains charger, which to date has never been used.