Electronics All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

About the Author

When Doug Lowe was 10 years old, his father gave him an electronics experimenter’s kit that started a lifelong love of all things electronic. As a child, Doug dreamed of becoming an electrical engineer. But he soon discovered that he loved writing as much as he loved electronics, and his first technical book was published in 1981. Since then, he has written more than 100. All those books have been about one specific corner of the electronics world: computers. But now he has finally written a book about his first love, the joy of designing and building electronic circuits from scratch.

Doug lives in sunny Fresno, California, where the motto is “Fres-YES!” (unfortunately, he’s not making that up). The fruits of his electronic passions can often be seen around the Halloween season in the form of animated computer-controlled Halloween decorations that rival Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

Dedication

My grandpa had a wonderful workshop behind his home. It was cramped and cold in the winter and smelled of machine oil, stale coffee, aged rubber, and damp wood — like an ancient hardware store clinging to life down the road from a giant big-box store. It was there that I began a lifelong love of electronics, as my grandpa tried to explain the mystery of electricity and taught me how to use a soldering iron, read a voltmeter, and test a questionable vacuum tube.

In the spring of 1970, he showed up at my house with a trailer full of everything an 11-year-old boy could possibly ...