About the Author
When Doug Lowe was 10 years old, his father gave him an electronics experimenter’s kit that started a lifelong love of all things electronic. As a child, Doug dreamed of becoming an electrical engineer. But he soon discovered that he loved writing as much as he loved electronics, and his first technical book was published in 1981. Since then, he has written more than 100. All those books have been about one specific corner of the electronics world: computers. But now he has finally written a book about his first love, the joy of designing and building electronic circuits from scratch.
Doug lives in sunny Fresno, California, where the motto is “Fres-YES!” (unfortunately, he’s not making that up). The fruits of his electronic passions can often be seen around the Halloween season in the form of animated computer-controlled Halloween decorations that rival Disney’s Haunted Mansion.
Dedication
My grandpa had a wonderful workshop behind his home. It was cramped and cold in the winter and smelled of machine oil, stale coffee, aged rubber, and damp wood — like an ancient hardware store clinging to life down the road from a giant big-box store. It was there that I began a lifelong love of electronics, as my grandpa tried to explain the mystery of electricity and taught me how to use a soldering iron, read a voltmeter, and test a questionable vacuum tube.
In the spring of 1970, he showed up at my house with a trailer full of everything an 11-year-old boy could possibly need to create his own electronics lab. The trailer was stacked high with broken radios and box after box filled with tools and spare parts: vacuum tubes, soldering irons, condensers, voltmeters, resistors, tube testers, and tuning capacitors.
I can still remember the look on my dad’s face when he saw that trailer full of junk pull up in front of our house, hitched to the back of Grandpa’s old Buick.
I was in heaven. I think my dad may have been somewhere else.
But he helped unload the trailer, and then he built me an amazing workbench with enough shelves and drawers to store everything and more.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandpa, Kenneth D. Lowe, Sr., and to my dad, Kenneth D. Lowe, Jr.
To my grandfather, for giving me an amazing gift buried in a trailer full of junk. And to my dad, for letting me keep it.
Author’s Acknowledgments
First, I’d like to thank Elizabeth Stilwell for giving me the opportunity to do a third edition of this book, as well as the Katies: Katie Mohr and Katie Feltman for green-lighting the two previous editions.
And special thanks to Elizabeth Kuball for editing this third edition, as well as the second edition before it and all the other projects we’ve done over the past few years. Let’s do it again, please!
Thanks also to Kirk Kleinschmidt, who gave the book a great technical review and offered many excellent suggestions along the way. And, of course, thanks to all the behind-the-scenes people who chipped in with help that I’m not even aware of.
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
Associate Editor: Elizabeth Stilwell
Project Editor: Elizabeth Kuball
Copy Editor: Elizabeth Kuball
Technical Editor: Kirk Kleinschmidt
Production Editor: Tamilmani Varadharaj
Cover Photos: © kilukilu/Shutterstock