Yes, that's basically the purpose of this book. Though amazingly experts will also learn many things and find it useful too.
I took the Physics 123 class at Harvard, from which this book developed from the original course notes, and uses this as the textbook (the class is still taught by Horowitz who has encyclopediac knowledge of electronics and Hayes who replaced Hill when he left Harvard. These guys also wrote the accompanying lab manual which I also highly recommend). You had all sorts of non-scientific people in the class.
To give some context, one semester is split into two halves. The first half covers analog electronics, and ends with a lab where the whole class designed and built a system to take analog audio signal, pulse-width modulate it to an IR transmitter, broadcast across the room to another receiver circuit that demodulates, amplifies, and plays it. Designed by students that originally never knew what a resistor or transistor was.
Second half is all digital, starts with glue logic and ends with the building of a breadboard computer (68008, the 8-bit external bus flavor of 68008). We'd write assembly programs into an EEPROM and program it to do all kinds of things. Again, students that had no idea what a NAND gate was nor ever wrote a line of code.
I wonder if anyone knows if there is a comparable reference for mechanical engineering? Something that someone in a different discipline could use to get at least conversant in. I'm a EE who has been interested in building more mechanical things (especially how to compute things mechanically), but some of my biggest problems are know what search terms to use when trying to look things up. Like for instance I've been wanting something like a mechanical multiplier/mixer. There would be one rotating input shaft, two rotating output shafts (call them X and Y), and a "control" input which would direct the input shaft motion to the output shafts in proportion to the control. So if the control were at say the "zero" position, all the input motion would be transmitted to the X shaft, and Y would be motionless. When the control was at the "one" position, all the motion would be transmitted to the Y shaft, and X would be stationary. The control would be continuously variable, and it would be great if it also performed the sinusoidal conversion at the same time, essentially:
X = Input * sin(control)
Y = Input * cos(control)
...I imagine something like this must exist, and deriving it from first principles probably isn't exceedingly difficult, but knowing what it is called is another matter.
Getting back to the topic at hand, I suppose the book I'm dreaming of would cover things like gears/pulleys and their common/interesting combinations (like a differential), springs, thermodynamics, hydraulics, linkages, heat engines, etc.. And as long as I'm dreaming if there are also similar texts for chemistry and cellular biology/DNA/genetic engineering, I'd also purchase those.
Thanks for that I am getting into ardunio and was looking for good textbook - I have basic electronics back from my engineeing ONC and need sligly more up to date book than the priciples of wireless that I inherited from my dad - pre transistor age and still referes to capacitors as condensors :-)
I took the Physics 123 class at Harvard, from which this book developed from the original course notes, and uses this as the textbook (the class is still taught by Horowitz who has encyclopediac knowledge of electronics and Hayes who replaced Hill when he left Harvard. These guys also wrote the accompanying lab manual which I also highly recommend). You had all sorts of non-scientific people in the class.
To give some context, one semester is split into two halves. The first half covers analog electronics, and ends with a lab where the whole class designed and built a system to take analog audio signal, pulse-width modulate it to an IR transmitter, broadcast across the room to another receiver circuit that demodulates, amplifies, and plays it. Designed by students that originally never knew what a resistor or transistor was.
Second half is all digital, starts with glue logic and ends with the building of a breadboard computer (68008, the 8-bit external bus flavor of 68008). We'd write assembly programs into an EEPROM and program it to do all kinds of things. Again, students that had no idea what a NAND gate was nor ever wrote a line of code.