Circuit Stories

At the beginning of the year, I realized I’d been a part of EE SE for 11 years. I decided that this was a good opportunity to take stock of what I had contributed to this platform. My contributions I can categorize them into the following groups: Structured answers I take my answers much more seriously than is customary on this Q&A site. They are more than just simple answers; they are more like tutorials. To that end, I structure them into hierarchically organized sections like these: Introduction:  Following this idea, I usually start my answers by justifying the need for a "circuit philosophy" to understand circuits, not just specific explanations. This appeal of mine is addressed not only to OPs, who at this stage are more interested in the specific answer, but also to my colleagues, whom I am trying to introduce to this idea. Basic idea:  To understand a circuit, specific explanations alone are not enough; we need to understand the basic idea on which the circuit is ...

I came up with the idea of using meters with identical internal resistance to represent resistors about a year ago. I began implementing this method to simplify circuit diagrams and decided to share it on StackExchange EE as a dialogue with  Gemini AI . Unfortunately, my question and answer were met with negative feedback and were ultimately deleted by the moderators. As a result, I have chosen to publish these materials on my blog. My question The problem Early on, when I started working with CircuitLab , I noticed that reading voltages and currents in schematics using virtual meters made them look cluttered. Then I noticed that CircuitLab allows you to conveniently set the internal resistance of a meter within very wide limits. Thus, an "ideal" ammeter with zero internal resistance can be transformed into an imperfect ammeter with high resistance, and an "ideal" voltmeter with infinite internal resistance into an imperfect voltmeter with small resistance. This, ...

In this post I have shared a bit about my process for crafting answers on StackExchange Electrical Engineering and the challenges I encounter. My style of writing The primary issue stems from my rather unconventional writing style. Instead of composing a complete response in one go, I tend to work in a rather chaotic manner, adding thoughts and ideas to a “skeleton" as they come to me. This approach is typical of a creative, inventive mind, a topic I have explored in more detail in How to extract and record new ideas . How I create my answers To elaborate, my process usually unfolds as follows: A question piques my interest and I am eager to provide an answer. I am interested in fundamental questions that have a certain trickiness to them. These are usually taken from textbooks and books by well-known authors (Horowitz and Hill, Sedra, Razavi, etc.) Unfortunately, fewer and fewer such questions are being asked lately. Thankfully, software sometimes "awakens" old questio...

A real conversation with Gemini... Since the idea of creating a series of AI-assisted circuit stories Talking with Gemini was born, I have been constantly experimenting. This is my latest story about diode circuits written in collaboration with Gemini AI (in italic), which I have tried to make look even more natural, like a real human conversation. It is based on the original StackExchange story and its copy in my blog . Here is the story itself... My suggestion to Gemini Gemini, I have been thinking about diode configurations lately. You know, sometimes they are in series... Simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab ... or sometimes parallel. Simulate this circuit It got me wondering which is better and why. I even tried to  answer it on StackExchange. But I think it would be more fun if we created our own explanation together. We could make up a story or something. I will be taking a more creative approach this time. While I will still referenc...