Electrical Engineering

Electrical Engineering

A book-length path from first-principles circuits to an ESP32 capstone, then applied Hardware Bring-Up, Instrumentation, Power Electronics & Validation. The throughline is prediction followed by measurement: make the board legible, then prove it with instruments. 53 chapters.

Glossary → People → Review →

Read it like an interactive book

From a single resistor to hardware you can trust

The course keeps returning to two machines: a low-power ESP32 sensor node and a robot-hand electronics stack. The early chapters build prediction muscles with current, voltage, GPIO, ADCs and buses. The later chapters use the same habits on bring-up, probes, cables, converters, motors, heat, reliability and manufacturing test.

Story first. Each strong chapter opens with a concrete failure, field habit or historical anchor before the notation appears.

Drive the idea. Demos and calculators are there to be pushed until the equation becomes physical.

Prove the board. The finish line is not "it works once"; it is measured, debugged and validated hardware.

Foundations

Phase 0

The Promise + Safety

  1. 🗺️ #0 Course Map The Book Spine: From First Spark to Validated Hardware
  2. ⚠️ #1 Safety & Tools The Habits That Keep You and the Board Alive
Phase 1

DC Circuits

  1. ⚡ #2 Ohm's Law + Power The First Equation That Lets a Circuit Answer Back
  2. 🔗 #3 Series/Parallel + Voltage Divider How Circuits Share Current and Voltage
  3. 🌍 #4 Ground, References, and Measurement Gotchas Why Zero Volts Is a Choice, Not a Place
Phase 2

Components

  1. 🔋 #5 Capacitors + RC Time Constant Charge, Voltage Memory, and Circuits That Need Time
  2. 💡 #6 Diodes + LEDs Polarity, Forward Voltage, Current Limiting, and Clamp Paths
  3. 🔀 #7 Transistors/MOSFETs as Switches GPIO Control, Load Current, Gate Drive, and Heat
Phase 3

Microcontrollers

  1. 🔘 #8 GPIO Inputs Floating Pins, Pull Resistors, and Buttons You Can Trust
  2. 📶 #9 Timers + PWM Duty Cycle, Flicker, Timers, and Real Loads
  3. 📊 #10 ADC Reading Quantization, Noise, Averaging, and Sensor Voltage
  4. 🔗 #11 I²C Communication Shared Wires, Pull-Ups, Addresses, ACKs, and Bus Debugging
  5. 📡 #12 UART Logging + Debugging Serial Frames, Baud Rate, USB Bridges, and Logs That Survive Bring-Up
  6. ⚡ #13 5 V vs 3.3 V Logic + Level Shifting Input Limits, Thresholds, Dividers, Buffers, and Bidirectional Buses
Phase 4

ESP32 Deep Dive

  1. 📌 #14 ESP32 Pins: Strapping Pins, Input-Only, Boot Traps Reset-Time Ownership, Module Constraints, and Pin Assignments That Survive Layout
  2. 🌙 #15 Deep Sleep: Wake Sources, State, RTC Memory Battery Life Is a State Machine With the Power Removed Between Steps
Phase 5

Capstone

  1. 🌡️ #16 Sensor Selection + I²C Wiring From Physical Question to Address Scan
  2. 🏗️ #17 Firmware Architecture Task Loop, State Machine, Error Budget
  3. 📶 #18 Wi‑Fi Transmit Strategy Batching, Retries, Timeouts, Security
  4. 🔋 #19 Power Budget + Measurement Calculating Battery Lifetime
  5. 🚀 #20 Validation + Enclosure + Ship It Final Checklist

Applied Systems

A continuous robot-hand subsystem is the throughline: bring it up, probe it, talk to it over CAN / SPI / I²C, spin its motors, feed it clean power, size its cables and converters, and validate it to quantitative targets. Each lesson links back to the foundations it builds on.

Module 1

Bring-Up & First Power

Assessment →
  1. 🔬 #21 The Bring-Up Mindset Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Pre-Power Inspection
  2. 💨 #22 The Smoke Test Current-Limited Power-On & Fault Localization
  3. 🩺 #23 Rails, Clocks & Reset Verifying the First Layer of Life
  4. 🫀 #24 Bus & Peripheral Bring-Up JTAG to Heartbeat to One Bus at a Time
Module 2

Measurement & Instrumentation

Assessment →
  1. 🔌 #25 Probes & Grounding Why Your Ground Lead Is Lying to You
  2. ➖ #26 Differential Measurement & CMRR Reading the Difference, Rejecting the Noise
  3. 🔋 #27 Current, Power & the Art of Sensing Shunts, Hall Probes, Rogowski & Power Analyzers
  4. 🌡️ #28 Thermal & Data Acquisition Emissivity, Sensors & Logging the Whole Story
Module 3

Differential Buses · CAN & Ethernet

Assessment →
  1. 🚌 #29 CAN Physical Layer & Termination Dominant, Recessive, and the 60-Ohm Health Check
  2. 🚧 #30 CAN Errors & Debug TEC, REC, Bus-Off and the Lonely Node
  3. 🌐 #31 Ethernet PHY, Magnetics & Auto-Negotiation Why a Link Light Is Not Good Data
  4. 👁️ #32 Ethernet Debug & Signal Integrity TDR, Eye Diagrams and the PHY Registers
Module 4

Single-Ended Buses · SPI & I²C

Assessment →
  1. 🔗 #33 SPI & Its Four Modes CPOL, CPHA, CS Framing and Clock Integrity
  2. ⬆️ #34 I²C Open-Drain & Pull-Up Sizing The Rise-Time vs Sink-Current Tug of War
  3. 🔁 #35 I²C Transactions, Stretching & Recovery The 9th Clock, the Held Line, and the Stuck Bus
  4. 🧰 #36 Protocol Decode & Tooling Logic Analyzer vs Scope, and When to Reach for Each
Module 5

Motors, Actuators & FOC

Assessment →
  1. 🧵 #37 Phase Resistance & the 4-Wire Method Measuring Milliohms Without Lying to Yourself
  2. 🔺 #38 Wye, Delta & the Copper Thermometer Line-to-Line vs Phase, and Why R Tells Temperature
  3. 🧲 #39 Inductance, Ke, Kt & Pole-Pairs The Constants That Tie Volts to Torque
  4. 🎛️ #40 FOC, Current Sensing & Thermals Riding the Rotor so AC Looks Like DC
Module 6

Power Delivery & Grounding

Assessment →
  1. 🌲 #41 The Power Tree & Choosing a Regulator LDO vs Buck: Heat, Noise and Efficiency
  2. 🔌 #42 Decoupling & the Power Distribution Network A Local Battery for Every Fast Current Spike
  3. ⏱️ #43 Sequencing & Inrush The Order Rails Wake Up, and Taming the First Gulp
  4. 🪨 #44 Grounding, Return Paths & EMI Two Roads Home Is One Road Too Many
Module 7

Power Electronics

Assessment →
  1. ⚡ #49 Line Losses & Voltage Drop Why High Voltage Moves Power Better
  2. 🔁 #50 Converter Topologies Buck, Boost and Buck-Boost
  3. 📡 #51 RF Power & S-Parameters Reflections, VSWR and What S11 Means
  4. 🌡️ #52 Thermal Design for Power Semiconductors Conduction, Switching Loss and Junction Temperature
Module 8

Validation, Reliability & Test

Assessment →
  1. 📐 #45 Characterization, Verification & Validation Three Words People Use Interchangeably and Should Not
  2. 🛁 #46 Reliability: HALT, Arrhenius, Weibull & the Bathtub Breaking It on Purpose to Learn Where It Breaks
  3. 🐟 #47 Root Cause & FMEA Five Whys, Fishbones, and the Number That Ranks Risk
  4. 🏭 #48 HIL Automation & Manufacturing Test From a Bench of One to a Line of Thousands