EQUATIONS, EQUATIONS-Calculate and convert

Published:2011/8/12 0:58:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

By Harry Baggen

Electronics is not always plain sailing. Although a small circuit can be built quickly without jotting down complex formulas, a deeper or more theoretical approach soon calls for equations and basic maths. There is no need however to know everything from the top of your head as the Internet is available to assist.

Electronics can be downright easy... but also horrendously difficult. Once you’ve mastered a few basic ’laws’ and have an idea of the operation of a number of passive and active parts, you’ll get remarkably far in designing a circuit. However, far more learning is in order for a theoretical approach or more accurate calculations on electronic circuits. Soon, you may feel drowned in formular and equations and the fun wears off quickly. Those of you who have completed a formal education in electronics probably don’t have to be told how complex a circuit design can turn out to be.

In addition to a solid base in electronics and mathematics there are many bits of knowledge you do not need every day — just think of the horrors of a Laplace transformation or a Fourier series. In those cases it is useful to have an overview handy of where to find such subjects. Sure, they are covered in electronics textbooks, but where exactly?

The Internet contains nice compilations of calculations for a multitude of electronics subjects. Even if you do not have your maths ready just there and then, it is good to know you can almost instantly refresh your memory. A good base for such a ’calculus collection’ is found at the RF Cafe . Right at the top of the homepage you’ll find a table that begins with Equations & References. Below it you can click on two links, Electrical and General. Both supply an alphabetical list of technical subjects, where the first is of course the most interesting to us. Although the RF Cafe is mostly dedicated to high frequency (radio) design, this overview does not fail to cover a much wider range: from the size of miniature bulbs right up to the design of PCB microstrips. Even browsing around in this overview will soon enable you to pick out some really useful bits like the elementary calculations for various passive components and all filter transfer functions. Not forgetting, of course, copper wire gauge comparison tables and resistor series. The more RF inclined among you will certainly appreciate the VSWR calculations and the Smith chart.

Nearly all subjects have their own page in the RF Cafe website. Some links head off to other websites, unfortunately including some dead ones. However, the amount of ready to use information crammed into the website is such that these errors can be excused.

On the General page you’ll find general-purpose information like bolt & nut sizes, the Greek alphabet, global time zones, sound properties in different materials, thermocouples and heatsink calculations just to mention a few. Although the Calculator section contains several links to commercial software packages, it does include lots of nifty calculation programs for direct use.







The RF Cafe has lots more to offer, particularly of course on RF design. We’ll hold the subject over to another installment of electronics online; else we should have called this installment ’RF Cafe’ straight way! There’s one link however we simply must tell you about: on the Electrical Conversions, Formulas & References page is a reference to the entire (scanned) Handbook of Mathematical Functions, a more than 1,000 pages thick standard textbook containing just about any formula, graph and table we could think of. The entire book (originally published in 1964) is available free of charge from Convertlt.

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