Page 229 - 15 Dangerously Mad Projects for the Evil Genius

APPENDIX

Electronics

Construction Primer

THIS APPENDIX PROVIDES a few useful hints and tips instance, it is common to place GND lines near the
for electronic construction used in the majority of bottom of a diagram and higher voltages near the
the projects in this book. top of a diagram. This allows someone reading the
schematic to visualize the flow of charge through
the system from higher voltages to lower voltages.
Circuits
When there is not enough room to draw all the
The author likes to start a project with a vague connections to GND, another convention in
notion of what he wants to achieve and then start schematic diagrams is to use the little bar symbol
designing from the perspective of the electronics. to indicate a connection to GND.
The way to express an electronic circuit is to Schematic diagrams can be drawn with many
use a schematic diagram. The author has included different tools. Some of them are integrated
schematic diagrams for all the projects in this electronics CAD (computer-aided design) products
book, so even if you are not very familiar with that will go on to lay out the tracks on a printed
electronics, you should now have seen enough circuit board for you. By and large, these create
schematics to understand roughly how they relate fairly ugly-looking diagrams, and because of this
to the stripboard diagrams also included. the author prefers to use pencil and paper or
general-purpose drawing software. All the diagrams
for this book were created using Omni Group’s
Schematic Diagrams
excellent but strangely named OmniGraffle
In a schematic diagram, connections between software, which is only available for Macs.
components are shown as lines. These connections OmniGraffle templates for drawing breadboard
will use the copper strips of a piece of stripboard layouts and schematic diagrams are available for
and the wires connecting one strip to another. download from www.dangerouslymad.com.

Schematic diagrams (Figure A-1) have a few
conventions that are worth pointing out. For

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