Combining and Varying Electrical Quantities

 By the mid-1990s, I had already developed my own philosophy about electronic circuits, and I decided it was time to share it with my colleagues. In the spring of 1997, I presented a series of three papers at the XXXII Scientific Conference on Communication, Electronic and Computer Systems at the Technical University of Sofia. The first of these was devoted to my heuristic course on analog circuits, in which I had implemented my circuit philosophy. There I shared my idea of combining and varying electrical quantities for the purposes of understanding, presenting and inventing  circuits. In this post, I will tell you about this venture of mine.

The Idea

A large part of electronic devices we can "invent" by combining and varying with the parameters of the studied object. For this purpose, in a series of experiments, we choose successively an independent and a dependent variable, keeping the other quantities constant. We then begin to vary the independent variable and observe the behavior of the dependent variable. By making such separate "sections" of the studied object, we "reverse" and combine the cause-and-effect relationships between individual quantities, get new points of view and penetrate deeply into the essence of things

Examples

  • If we assume that in a basic electrical circuit voltage causes current (the usual cause-and-effect relationship), and start varying the quantities voltage and resistance, we get a ''voltage-to-current'', ''resistance-to-current'', and ''voltage-to-current dividers'' already mentioned.
  • Conversely, if we assume that the current causes voltage (reversing the cause-and-effect relationship) and vary the quantities current and resistance, we obtain the remaining converters (''current-to-voltage'', ''resistance-to-voltage'', and ''current x resistance multiplier'').
  • Using the same techniques, we can turn a ''digital-to-analog converter'' into a ''programmable amplifier'' and ''multiplier'', and an ''analog-to-digital converter'' into a ''ratio meter'' and digital ''sample & hold circuit''.

Web resources

Combining and Varying Electrical Quantities (to invent various circuits in Circuit Idea wikibook))

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