Chapter 15. Electronics and Fairy Dust

Tinker Bell and Peter Pan could fly thanks to a happy thought and some fairy dust. Our projects also need some fairy dust to fly, in the form of ghostly subatomic particles called electrons. Moving electrons are the basis of electricity, and their behavior in components is the basis of the field we call electronics. A beginner might view electronics as a difficult and inscrutable topic, and circuits as tiny and complicated objects. Electronics books are chock-full of math and physics formulas, so there is apparently nothing magic or fantastical…just a bunch of stuff an engineer would love!

But if you looked at electronics metaphorically, with an artist’s eye, you could see wires and currents as pipes and ...

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