A Return to the Basics

It came over me like a flood of old memories the other day, this strong desire to do something that I had not done in oh, so many years. I'm not sure where it originated, if deep in some stressful moment, like when the child on his first day of school desires the comfort of his blanket to relieve the tension of the new and frightening experiences; but I needed, desparately needed to do this thing. And so I did.

Turning away from the computer, I pulled out the pencil and a pad of paper and drew the sketch that so filled my eager mind: a set of four parallel lines, horizontal, crossed with two verticals, then some triangular waves connected to the odd circular icon in the middle, the one with the descending arrow, with more wavy lines, more parallel. At last, it was complete, except for the best part - the calculations! V=IR, Ib=(Vcc-0.7)/R1, Ic=(V-0.2)/R2. How rapidly the formulas come to mind still, how quickly the values are filled in, tasted for correctness, savored, enjoyed.

Ah, it was heavenly bliss.

When the world becomes a complicated and frustrating morass of impossible demands and there is nothing on the horizon to bring peace to a troubled mind, it is always refreshing to return to the things in life that bring the greatest satisfaction, the simple joys, like the calculations for the quiescent state of a bipolar NPN transistor.

It was one of my favorite classes in college, the one where we took apart the 741 Op Amp, block by block, until we understood the reason behind every diode, every resistor, every element of its ultra-slick design, from the basic current source to the Darlington-paired outputs, until we could explain the function of each and every element in our sleep. It was the one class where I actually experienced that moment of explosive understanding, that 'click', where suddenly It All Made Sense, and suddenly it was So Easy.

I hadn't experienced that for a long time, since my father had let me study his correspondence-school books on Electronics back when I was ten or eleven and I devoured it, ate it, drank it, breathed it, dreamed it, until I realized with a cosmic thud that this is what I was meant to do, this is my life's work.

And now I was so eager to return to it, the simplicity of transistor electronics, the joy of creating a simple circuit that does nothing more than modulate the rate of change of current flow through one path by application of a smaller current in another path: a simple controller. If there was nothing else in the world over which I could have control - not my job, my house, the weather, the future, my children - at least I would be able to control this little 40 milliampere current racing through this tiny silicon sandwhich over this tiny wire to excite the photons off this light-emitting diode and thus signal that there was something in the world I could count on.

Maybe tomorrow I'll hook up two of 'em, toss in some coupling capacitors, and make me one of those monostable multivibrators. Ooh, the excitement! I can hardly wait!