Art of Electronics: Digital
The course was taught by Dr. Oliver Saunders Wilder, but was previously taught by Tom Hayes. Hayes is now retired but taught a guest lecture on ADCs/DACs. He was graciously signed my copy of the textbook.
I recently completed The Art of Electronics: Digital at Harvard University. I first heard about this in the Nand2Tetris forum. The textbook was mentioned as a good, hands-on way to learn about electronics. I checked the textbook out from my local library and saw that it was written for a class at Harvard. Seeing as how I live in the Boston area, I checked to see if it was offered as a night class. It turned out that it was, so I signed up. My class was taught by Dr. Oliver Saunders Wilder with Dr. Scott Ficarro as a teaching assistant. This was in was the first in-person offering of the class since the start of the pandemic. The course took place on Thursdays from late-January to early-May at the Harvard Science Center.
The course was broken into two parts. The first part covered topics such as logic gates, counters, flip-flops, latches, and ADCs/DACs. The second half of the course covered assembly language. Each 4-hour class was split between a lecture and a lab. The lecture usually took 1-2 hours. remaining time was allocated to the labs. Throughout the labs we built build a micro controller. The lab time during the was last 4 weeks or so were devoted to a final project of choice.
My lab partner and I were unable to finish the microcontroller, but here is how far we go. I personally found the lab to be the most challenging part of the course. There was something challenging about trying to trouble shoot the microcontroller while learning about it at the same time. It also didn’t help that the labs usually from from 8:00-10:00 on Thursday nights.
Overall, I found the class to be very helpful for understanding basic digital electronics. I now can make sense of datasheets for digital electronics parts. I now understand the basics of things that confused me before like pull-up/pull-down resistors, active high vs active low, and timing diagrams. Unfortunately, I got swamped with work during the final month or so of the course, so I was not able to study assembly language to the extent that I wanted to. I was hoping that Nand2Tetris would have helped me understand assembly better, but The Art of Electronics took a much more detailed approach to explaining the topic. While we touched on topics like the types of communication protocols and also designing PCBs, we did not go into these as much as I would have liked since these topics are more relevant to my work than assembly language.
Dr. Saunders Wilder gave each of us a PCB ‘badge’ for completing the class.
I also noticed how much I enjoyed taking an in-person class compared to online classes, the first time since I graduated college. It was a breath of fresh air being able to talk to the professor and my classmates. I also had a lot of fun since my grade didn’t matter for anything.
I look forward to taking Art of Electronics: Analog Circuits in the fall.
I was planning on taking Art of Electronics: Analog in the fall of 2023 but the class was not offered since there were not enough interest in the class. I hope the class will be offered in 2024.
[On a side note, my class on 4/13 was cancelled due to a fake bomb threat next to the Science Center, so that was interesting.]
(https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/4/14/suspicious-package-science-center/)]