Chapter 4
Running Down the
Skills You Need
In This Chapter
Discovering schematics
Assembling little bits and pieces on breadboards
Spiffing up your soldering skills
Troubleshooting problems with a multimeter
Working with the boxes that enclose your projects
Y
ou need three key things to build an electronics project: materials, a
workspace, and certain skills that help you assemble the materials into
something that moves, beeps, lights up, or otherwise makes itself electronically
known to the world. (You also need time, but we’ll leave that to you to find.)In Chapter 3, we talk about organizing your materials and workspace. In this
chapter, we address the third element — the skills that you need to read cir-
cuit designs, build, and test electronics projects. This chapter provides an
overview of these skills; for more comprehensive explanations, check out
Electronics For Dummies,by Gordon McComb and Earl Boysen (Wiley).It’s Symbolic: Reading a Schematic..............................................................
A schematicis your blueprint for building an electronics project. A blueprint
for building a house uses various symbols to represent elements, such as
doors, and lines to show walls. Instead of doors and walls, the symbols and
lines in a schematic represent components such as transistors, integrated cir-
cuits (ICs), and resistors as well as the wires that connect them.Be sure to check out the Cheat Sheet (the yellow page at the front of this
book) for a table of commonly used schematic symbols.