This shared OneNote notebook is Greg Kovacs' curated set of useful and interesting electronics information, which is currently a work-in-progress, but begins with a taxonomy of information so that it is possible to find what one is looking for.
This is not a replacement for the many books and materials on the internet. Nothing could compare, for example, with Horowitz and Hill's "The Art of Electronics." So what is this then? Well, as a lifelong electronics and biomedical guy, I wanted to document and share some of the often hard-won knowledge that comes from a long career of solving problems and also exploring interesting concepts in electronics. I have to admit that some of the most interesting things I have learned about code and circuits have come from moments of "I wonder if…?" inspiration followed by hours, days, weeks, or months of exploration. Most of these ideas were fun, but also dead ends. Sometimes, however, something magical happened. It is the rare reward that keeps us in the game. It's about dopamine, incidentally.
So this is not a catalog nor is it a textbook. It is an effort to build - over time (please be patient) - a collection of material to help with designs and concepts that are not "standard textbook" stuff, perhaps a bit more esoteric for some. However, if you have ever tried to design some of the things I will discuss, you will already know that there are subtleties and details one needs to spend time on. My goal here is to share what I learned on those journeys. Engineering is all about building on the work of each other.
The idea here is that I can create this live archive of useful stuff, and other VoidLoop contributors can add their own. The notebook sections are my effort to group information in a browsable way, but I'm always open to suggestions. Right now - as we are standing up the content - most sections will be empty for now, but will give you a sense for how the ideas are grouped together. Many of the concepts in the taxonomy are, however, already covered in the voluminous Stanford course notes that are on the VoidLoop site. Please take a look. You will find tested resources on analog/mixed-signal circuits, biomedical electronics, MEMS, and discrete bipolar transistor circuits.
Why OneNote? Easy. It is live editable, WYSIWIG, allows embedding of graphics, links, etc., and syncs across many devices easily. As long as the material is being assembled, this is absolutely critical. I really hope Microsoft supports OneNote forever. If they don't the captured content could, in principle, be migrated to some more rigid format for the web.
So, for now, here we go.
I hope you find this useful.
Greg Kovacs
Palo Alto, California, July 2020