Circuit Diagrams

As a boy, the more I took apart the hand-held transistor radios and games the easier it became to identify the various parts that were on the circuit boards. It was a lot harder, however, to figure out how all the parts worked together. While it was possible to take electronic devices apart and put them back together without a basic understanding of the circuit, it was impossible to figure out how the devices actually worked. Once I understood how circuits worked, not only was I able to begin to understand how the electronic devices worked but I was also able to build simple circuits on my own.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• What a circuit is
• What open, closed, and short circuits are
• What Fritzing diagrams are
• What schematic diagrams are
• What the differences between series and parallel circuits are

Before we can begin developing our own electronic projects we need to have a basic understanding of what circuits are and how to design them. In this chapter, we will look at the knowledge we need to begin designing and creating basic circuits.