Trying to make a comeback

[Jonnytizzle]

Hello.  My name is John and I am from South Florida.  I attended ITT Tech and graduated with a two year electronics degree in 1994.  Since then I have not done anything in the field of electronics except for building and tinkering with home computers.  I have a pretty firm grasp, or so I thought, of the basics but want to know in more detail how they really work.  I remember the digital logic stuff from ITT back in the day but now realize I forgot pretty much everything when it comes to boolean algebra and all the stuff covered in chapter 1.  I find myself feeling quite overwhelmed now and look at the hardware simulator and the related projects and begin to pretty much drool on myself.  I am willing to put the time in but do not know where to start.  If anyone can offer some advice I would greatly appreciate it.


Thank you all.  

[cadet1620]

A nice site that might serve as a refresher for digital logic is http://www.play-hookey.com/digital/. There is a very nice schematic based logic simulator, Logisim, that can be quite helpful.

Read the Project 0 materials on the Course Page.  Don't miss the lecture slides; hit the Acrobat icon in the Lecture column. Note that it is important to do the Project 0 work in the projects/00 directory, not the projects/01 directory.

Read The Hardware Construction Survival Kit

The projects in the book are well sequenced to lead you along. It is important to do the chips in the order presented in the book since they build upon each other in that sequence. For Project 1 follow the order starting with 1.2.2. Some people try to do the Xor when they are reading the chapter text, but it wont work without having implemented earlier required chips.

Ask questions on the forum. If you have questions that you don't think are of general interest to the forum, feel free to email me directly.

--Mark

[ybakos]

John, pick up a copy of Code by Charles Petzold. Strongly recommended.

[jonnytizzle]

thank you for all your help.  I will be working at it for as long as it takes.  Most of the 2 years was spent designing circuits with resistors, capacitors, diodes and other standard components.  The course ended with upgrading an 8086 and or an 8088 to a 386 sx computer and learning basic programming and working with programmable logic controllers.  I wish I would have stuck with it now.