What is Alternatronics

Alternatronics is a website that aims to make electronics easy and, above all, intuitive. In my life as an electronics engineer, I have found that academic or online explanations focus too much on the mathematical analysis of circuits. In real life, whether at work or in a personal project you may have, problems are rarely approached as they are in class. In college or in many online courses, they teach you to analyze, whereas what you should really be learning is how to design. Electronics problems commonly consist of transforming a circuit into equations and then solving them. That is not what knowing electronics means. Knowing electronics means knowing the components, their relationships and making your head work to do useful things with them. Attention, it should not be understood that mathematical support is not important. It is, and very much so. In many cases, it is even essential, but it should not be the priority.

In this site, I will explain concepts trying to understand them intuitively first. To do so, we will rely on analogies, graphs, simulations, small lies and half-truths. And, well, there will also be some equations, let's not fool ourselves. Alert academics: some of the things I write here would make Maxwell and Gauss cry a lot. If I do so, it is because I believe it facilitates understanding [or I am wrong, which will happen often ;-)]. There are already many rigorous books.

Who I am and why I'm doing this

I'm Miguel, an electronic designer by profession, although I studied Telecommunication Engineering. During most of my professional career I have been, and still am, dedicated to the design of electronic equipment onboard satellites or space probes, so I have spent a lot of time finding out good ways to design (and still so much to learn!😅).

There are countless times that I have felt frustrated when looking for online resources to understand a concept, and I have ended up more confused than when I started: poorly explained concepts, pleistocene websites, unusable calculators... I went through it so many times that I ended up with the firm conviction that it was possible to offer something better, although to try it, I had to learn how to develop web apps 🤪.