General – Page 2 – Electronics for Art and Education

Simulation

It is not always possible to experiment with electronics, simply because you do not have the right tools or components to try out a new idea. Nowadays there are a lot of simulation programs, that help you solve electronic puzzles. Below some examples of applications that can really be useful to try out:

CircuitJS1_Falstad

This application runs in the browser, it is for free and there are a lot of sample circuits available. During the simulation it shows the flow of current with moving dots – the higher the speed, the higher the current.

Checkout this link:

https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

iCircuit

A small but powerful application is iCircuit. It is not for free (few euro’s) but it runs on the Mac and PC. It has a good library with components and can give a realistic simulation of a circuit.

Yenka

Yenka is a simulation application designed for education. Not only electronics can be simulated, but lots of other technical, physical, mathematical and chemical processes can be simulated. For the students it is free of charge. You can use it without a license. Check it out:

https://www.yenka.com/technology/

Courses

Within the Royal Conservatoire there are multiple departments that cover Electronics as a obligatory subject for their Bachelor and Master education. On this website you will find the combined theory for these lessons.

Miscellaneous

Component tester

Heavy duty adjustable power supply

Standard digital multimeter

Big breadboard

Clips and measuring pen

Digital oscilloscope

Function generator

Introduction to Electronics

Electronics // Music Technology // Sound Reinforcement

This website is the landing-zone for electronic content of multiple courses within the Royal Conservatoire in Den Haag. The departments Sonology, ArtofSound, and ArtScience all have subjects that relate to Electronics and technology used in Art and Music and Sound reinforcement. The content on this website is created by multiple teachers from the different the departments. On this website you will find mostly theory and also practical examples that are a guideline for the lessons.

Introduction to Electronics for Sonology

The lessons “Introduction to electronics” for Sonology Bachelor 1 students are obligatory. The students will have to attend to 6 sessions where the fundamentals of electronics will be shared, discussed and practiced. To finish the course a small electronic device has to be made.

Introduction to Electronics for Artscience

Four group lessons will be given in the Syneasthesia studio in Amare (6.64). For the Ba1 group these lessons are obligatory. The keynotes of the actual subjects can be found on this website – mostly directly after the lesson.

Sensors Actuators and Microcontrollers (Artscience)

The course Sensors, Actuators and Microcontrollers deals with the fundamentals of interactive projects. The course consists of 8 full days of theoretical and practical lessons. The participants have to work on their own project.

Courses MT1, MT2, Elak2 and TTS2 Art of Sound

Here are the readers of the courses by Jan Panis for AOS. Basic Electronics for MT1, Network theory and Network audio for MT2, basics of Sounddesign with loudspeakers and the basics of Vectorworks CAD drawing for TTS2.

Balanced and un-balanced

In the world of professional audio there are normalized connectors in use to connect microphones, mixers and amplifiers. There are balanced and un-balanced connections. To deal with the transport of signals over longer distances (for example the microphone connected to the mixer) we make use of balanced cables. The shorter connections are mostly un-balanced (a keyboard connected to the amplifier).

Un-balanced audio signal

An un-balanced audio-signal consists of two wires, signal and ground. The ground is also used as a ‘shield’. A common example is the jack-cable connected to a guitar or synthesizer. Check the examples below

Balanced audio-signal

So what is a balanced signal? In order to be able to transport signals over longer distances, without disturbances, they came up with a clever mechanism, called a balanced signal. The original signal from a microphone is called the ‘hot’ signal (see “a” in graph below). If we invert this hot signal, we create a ‘cold’ signal. The cold signal is 180 degrees ‘out of phase’ (“b” in graph).

Over long (cable) distance disturbances will occur in both the hot and the cold signal, but the disturbances will not be out of phase. On the balanced-input of any audio device, the two signals “a” and “b” (hot and cold) are subtracted (with a differential amplifier). The result will be therefor ‘clean’ and double the value of the hot signal. The disturbances are eliminated.

An example for a balanced cable, is the common microphone cable with two XLR-connectors on both side. See below:

Fundamentals

What is Electronics?

Electronics is an absolute fascinating world with the possibility to create any circuit and any functionality that you would like. But bear in mind: electronics can be very complex and frustrating as well. Circuits that do not work. Components that smell funny or circuits which are unstable. How do you cope with that? Let’s start with the fundamentals of electronics:

Wiki definition: Electronics deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies. The nonlinear behavior of active components and their ability to control electron flows makes amplification of weak signals possible and electronics is widely used in information processing, telecommunications, and signal processing

Electronics is about the control of current in a circuit. If the current somewhere in the circuit is too small, it is not stable or not reliable. If the current too high, the temperature will be too high. It has to be somewhere in the middle. These lessons will give you a complete introduction to Electronics. We will focus on the basics and fundamental circuits that are applied in music and art. We will talk about the common applied components, passive and active and also the small programmable computers (Arduino, Teensy), or sensor interfaces will be part of the subjects.

Electrical current

All materials you can imagine are made out of atoms. The core of an atom is the nucleus which has protons and neutrons. In the outer shells there are electrons. Check the picture below.

Materials that do not conduct current, like wood, glas or plastic do not have free electrons, because the nucleus with positive particles is in balance with the negative electrons. Materials like copper, gold or metal are not in balance. They have more electrons in the outer shells which are not linked to the positive nucleus – this means they are free to move through the material. We have free electrons and thus: conductance.

When you think about current through a wire, you can imagine electrons like marbles (or water), that are pushed through a pipe (see image above). Electrical current is measured in Amperes. If the current is one ampere (1A), it means that in one second 6,242*10¹⁸ electrons pass a given point. The more current flows through a wire, the thicker the wire should be. Check the video section of the webiste.

The amount of current (Ampere) through a wire is determined by the applied Voltage (V) to that wire and the amount of resistance (Ohm) of that wire. This brings us to Ohms law. See lesson 1

Kirchoff

The behavior of current and voltage in a circuit is defined by the two laws of Kirchoff:
Kirchoff’s first law:

For any node (junction) in an electrical circuit, the sum of currents flowing into that node is equal to the sum of currents flowing out of that node.

This means that the current entering any junction is equal to the current leaving that junction. In math: i₂ + i₃ = i₁ + i₄

Kirchoffs’s second law:

The directed sum of the potential differences (voltages) around any closed loop is zero.

The sum of all the voltages around a loop is equal to zero. In other words:
v₁ + v₂ + v₃ +v₄ = 0

AC and DC

AC stands for Alternating Current. The value of the signal changes polarity over time with a certain frequency. The AC current will move both ways – back and forth.

DC stands for Direct Current. This means that the voltage does not change polarity over time. It is a straight line in the figure. Think about a battery. The plus (+) and minus (-) indicate you are dealing with DC. The current in the wire will move in one direction only.

Frequency

The frequency of a signal defines the amount of changes per second and is measured in units of Hertz [Hz]. So if we have an AC signal that changes (polarity) over time, this signal has a certain frequency.

Looking at the figure below you see a representation of a sine-wave. The circle on the left represents a rotating point (think of the pedal of a bicycle) – with starting at point “A”. The point rotates left and will go up towards point “B”. If we would draw the position of the moving point in time, we will see the first 90 degrees of a sine-wave. Following the pedal from “C” to “D” and back to the beginning at point “A”, we see a full sine-wave (360 degrees). This one full circle is also called one cycle (T). The variable T indicates the cycle time in seconds.

The amount of cycles that fit into one second (1 sec) is called the frequency F. So if we talk about a frequency of 1kHz (=1000Hz) this means that this signal makes 1000 cycles in one second.

Written in formula this looks like this. The smaller the cycle time , the higher the frequency.

Amplitude

The Amplitude, often indicated with “A” is a value for the “strength” of a signal. The Peak to Peak Amplitude (A2 in the figure) is the change between the two ‘peaks’ of the sine-wave – the maximum swing.

If you want to measure the average value of the sine-wave, this is called the RMS value of the Amplitude. (A3) The multimeter shows the RMS-value.

Phase

A mono signal cannot have ‘phase’, because phase is referring to a time difference between two repetitive signals. A sine-wave and a cosine-wave for example have a phase ‘angle’ of 90 degrees ( = 1/2π).

When two speakers are connected to an amplifier the correct way, both loudspeakers move forward and backward exactly the same time – the waves are ‘in phase’. If the connection of one speaker is then inverted (minus and plus swapped) we introduce two speakers that are ‘out of phase’. Check the waves below.

Electronic filters are created with time dependent components like capacitors or coils. When we connect an ac-signal (audio signal) to the input of a filter we can compare the in- and output to determine the ‘phase angle’ between both signals. In the figures below a positive- and negative phase example.

eVideos

Some useful video tutorials

Diodes explained

Transformers explained

Transistors explained

How do MosFets work?

How does a Potentiometer work?

DC-motor, how do they work?

Ohm’s law explained

Binary counting and computing

How do conductors (coils) work?

How does electricity work?

How logic gates work

How does an Antenna work?

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