Supplemental course instruction

So, I’m taking a DC Circuits class and I was doing fine with series circuits and parallel circuits and even parallel with series circuits combined. Then we started with Nodal, Mesh and Superposition for circuit analysis techniques and I’m starting to feel a bit lost. Does anyone have any good cheat sheets or supplemental learning materials so that I can more easily commit these processes to memory, or a good way to approach them so it make more intuitive sense? The teacher seems to delight in writing purposely misleading questions rather than just letting the math be complexity enough in this class.

It’s tough right at the beginning of the learning process with that much math and no hands-on. The nodal, mesh and superposition stuff is important, but it’s nice to get an intuitive feel for it before diving into the numbers. Maybe pick up a project with some op amps? That uses a lot of the techniques you’re talking about.

As for supplemental learning, I usually point people at the 6.002x course from MIT, though it’s pretty heavy math as well.

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I did recently put together and AM/FM radio kit. It works fine, but I need to grasp the math to pass this class. An op amp project would be fun. Do you have one you can recommend? I’ve got the analog discovery and parts kit from Digilent. I plan to enroll in Contextual Electronics at some point in time but took DC circuits to try to fill in some holes as I’m a professional software engineer.

Oh great! We love the AD2 around here. A good starting point might be this blog post:

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/testing-op-amp-circuits-with-the-analog-discovery-2

You can see how op amps react with different components in the feedback network, which is ultimately what a lot of that analysis you’re looking to learn will touch upon.