US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series(jacquesricher.com)
jacquesricher.com
US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series
http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/#
5 comments
> These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a collection of facts.
Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk Maxwell.
They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.
So yes, everything about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and often even "dumbed down".
So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.
Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk Maxwell.
They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.
So yes, everything about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and often even "dumbed down".
So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.
> They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.
The key here is "maintain, operate and repair".
Army training manuals are generally great for that.
They are not a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.
The key here is "maintain, operate and repair".
Army training manuals are generally great for that.
They are not a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.
I learned enough to know that a lot of people designing electronics taught by civilian colleges should have gone into the military first and learned how electronics works and what it gets subjected to in the field and how it can fail miserably and how us grease monkeys out there had to come up with often extremely clever, unimaginable fixes for the design goofs made by those civilian graduates who thought of themselves so highly.
Ah yes my favourite people.
So our radios and avionics go out with a test set. The wrench monkeys install it in the airframe and it doesn't work (the term used by the guy on the phone). So we say take the thing out of the airframe, plug it into the test set and run the test cases. We get a call back saying it doesn't work and can we come out.
So I haul my arse up to the other end of the country by plane and arrive at the facility. What do I find?
They haven't used the test set (because it didn't work), opened the avionics unit and piddled with the power supply and managed to blow up both the test set and the GPS. This is blamed on a design fault on our part.
So I get the units shipped back and we post mortem it and find that they were using the wrong harness. The one we get bak is from a completely different unit and serial.
Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects 48v DC
This was my life for three years.
That's also why so much cash gets pissed out of the window in the defense sector...
So our radios and avionics go out with a test set. The wrench monkeys install it in the airframe and it doesn't work (the term used by the guy on the phone). So we say take the thing out of the airframe, plug it into the test set and run the test cases. We get a call back saying it doesn't work and can we come out.
So I haul my arse up to the other end of the country by plane and arrive at the facility. What do I find?
They haven't used the test set (because it didn't work), opened the avionics unit and piddled with the power supply and managed to blow up both the test set and the GPS. This is blamed on a design fault on our part.
So I get the units shipped back and we post mortem it and find that they were using the wrong harness. The one we get bak is from a completely different unit and serial.
Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects 48v DC
This was my life for three years.
That's also why so much cash gets pissed out of the window in the defense sector...
Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects 48v DC
To be fair, if you made a change like that and didn't change the harness to make it physically incompatible, that's not the user's fault. It might not be your fault either, but it most assuredly is somebody's fault.
To be fair, if you made a change like that and didn't change the harness to make it physically incompatible, that's not the user's fault. It might not be your fault either, but it most assuredly is somebody's fault.
Well it's always someone's fault.
In this case there are only so many combinations of MIL-DTL-22992 out there.
It wasn't even our harness. No idea where it came from. Serno didn't register, wasn't shipped with the device and wasn't approved (I know as I wrote the asset tracking software).
I still reckon they lost the official harness, rigged this one up and FUBARed it but the moment you point a finger, the professional cockroaches scurry away.
In this case there are only so many combinations of MIL-DTL-22992 out there.
It wasn't even our harness. No idea where it came from. Serno didn't register, wasn't shipped with the device and wasn't approved (I know as I wrote the asset tracking software).
I still reckon they lost the official harness, rigged this one up and FUBARed it but the moment you point a finger, the professional cockroaches scurry away.
OK, but who's arguing otherwise?
After a time in the military myself, I find military resources to be somewhat suspect in terms of quality and accuracy.
True.
I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit.
My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.
I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit.
My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.
I don't disagree on the quality of these manuals (see my other comment), but for a beginner, The Art of Electronics is a very bad choice.
TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles.
For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are.
Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.
TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles.
For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are.
Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.
Hence why I suggested the student manual which is a little more forgiving.
TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.
TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.
As a budding a student of electronics, I found the mims book to be while not very rigorous to provide a good general overview and intuition on the field, which makes subsequent more "serious" more manageable, could you give more details as to why I should not read it?
1. Little explanation of how anything actually works which is crucial for intuition.
2. Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics.
3. It deals with basic construction and very basic fundamentals only really.
If you want to build a kit, it's fine but if you want to create something, forget it.
2. Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics.
3. It deals with basic construction and very basic fundamentals only really.
If you want to build a kit, it's fine but if you want to create something, forget it.
I read "Getting Started" over and over from age 7 or so. Nothing else made any sense at that age. It took me a while to digest it but I did figure out enough to do more with the "160 in one electronics board" [1] than the circuits suggested in its book.
Despite all the things I left out I am grateful that I had it. If it went on and on about engineering calculations, I would not have had the capacity or patience. I would recommend other books if asked by an adult, but is something better out now for kids?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=i...
Despite all the things I left out I am grateful that I had it. If it went on and on about engineering calculations, I would not have had the capacity or patience. I would recommend other books if asked by an adult, but is something better out now for kids?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=i...
Would you mind sharing your recommendations?
TAE, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Mims, and Charles Platt's series for Make tend to be the ones that come up most frequently, but I'd be curious to hear if you've found others that are excellent.
TAE, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Mims, and Charles Platt's series for Make tend to be the ones that come up most frequently, but I'd be curious to hear if you've found others that are excellent.
TAE of course. I also like Peter Wilson, _The Circuit Designer's Companion_, the 3rd edition is published 2012 by Newnes. It's on libgen if you want to look through it before buying.
Thank you, I'll check it out!
Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics
Is there a list of what's wrong somewhere? A quick Google does not reveal anything...
Is there a list of what's wrong somewhere? A quick Google does not reveal anything...
Actually the quality is superb. It is used to train many fine electronics personnel in the military. The military does not graduate people who do not know how to use what they learned or practical application.
I started on these books (we of course called them the NEETS modules) when I was 19 in electronic warfare school, and they are the exact same books that my dad used when he was an 18 year-old sonar technician in training. As others have pointed out in the thread, these are targeted towards an audience of those with an aptitude for electronics, and are therefore meant to give them a practical understanding of how to work with complex military electronic systems. You'll see mentions of things like electricity flowing from positive to negative and more complex concepts reduced down to simpler ones.
The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.
With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure of success of these books.
The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.
With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure of success of these books.
On the same site: Navy Electronic Warfare Manual[1]
[1]http://jacquesricher.com/EWhdbk/
[1]http://jacquesricher.com/EWhdbk/
I love stuff like this. We should have a site where resources can be bookmarked ... like pins if you will. And.. and we can follow certain topics of our interest. And we can call it Pinterest! And then we can keep hacker news for news :D
It's the non-news that keeps me coming to HN. Current events are often of limited relevance to real life. Hearing about the latest manufactured controversy does zero to make me a better person. I'd much rather learn something of lasting value.
Would recommend The Art of Electronics (just grab the 2nd edition and the student manual - it's fine) or Practical Electronics for Inventors.
Also stay away from Mimms books[1] and Make stuff. They're mostly glossy crap that doesn't actually have any content and are chock full of mistakes.
If you want to wire shit to an arduino, don't buy a book, just google it.
[1] Yes I know this is controversial but I started there and had to unlearn it all. It's a bad foundation.