About the Authors

When Doug Lowe was ten years old, his father gave him an electronics experimenter’s kit that started a life-long love of all things electronic. As a child, he dreamed of becoming an electrical engineer. But he soon discovered that he loved writing as much as he loved electronics, and his first technical book was published in 1981. Since then, Doug has written more than a hundred. All of those books have been about one specific corner of the electronics world: computers. But now he has finally written a book about his first love, the joy of designing and building electronic circuits from scratch.

Doug lives in sunny Fresno, California, where the motto is ‘Fres-YES!,’ (unfortunately, I’m not making that up). The fruits of his electronic passions can often be seen around the Halloween season, in the form of animated computer-controlled Halloween decorations that rival Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

Dickon Ross, adapting author for the UK edition, has been a science and technology journalist for twenty years, working on titles ranging from Electronics Times to Focus. Dickon is Editor-in-Chief for the Institution of Engineering and Technology, where he has won awards for his work on Engineering & Technology magazine and Flipside – the magazine he launched to inspire teenagers to take up science and engineering. His website is www.dickon.co.uk.

Dedication

My grandpa had a wonderful workshop behind his home. It was cramped and cold in the winter, and smelled of machine oil, stale coffee, aged rubber, and damp wood — like an ancient hardware store clinging to life down the road from a giant Big Box store. It was there that I began a lifelong love of electronics, as my grandpa tried to explain the mystery of electricity and taught me how to use a soldering iron, read a voltmeter, and test a questionable vacuum tube.

In the spring of 1970, he showed up at my house with a trailer full of everything an 11-year-old boy could possibly need to create his own electronics lab. The trailer was stacked high with broken radios and box after box filled with tools and spare parts: vacuum tubes, soldering irons, condensers, volt meters, resistors, tube testers, and tuning capacitors. I can still remember the look on my dad’s face when he saw that trailer full of junk pull up in front of our house, hitched to the back of grandpa’s old Buick. I was in heaven. I think my dad may have been somewhere else. But he helped unload the trailer, and then he built me an amazing workbench with enough shelves and drawers to store everything and more.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandpa, Kenneth D. Lowe Sr., and to my dad, Kenneth D. Lowe, Jr. To my grandfather, for giving me an amazing gift buried in a trailer full of junk. And to my dad, for letting me keep it.

–Doug

Author’s Acknowledgements

First, I’d like to thank Katie Feltman for giving me the opportunity to write this book. We’ve talked about doing something like this for years, and I was so delighted when she called me to discuss this project. I am especially grateful for her patience as deadlines came and went.

Next, I’d like to thank Christopher Morris, not only for doing such an incredible job as project editor on the original edition of this long project, but also for giving me the encouragement and support I needed along the way.

Thanks also to Kirk Kleinschmidt, who gave the original edition of this book a great technical review and offered many excellent suggestions not only on purely technical considerations but also on the presentation of complex material. And thanks to Heidi Unger, who as usual did a great job whipping my prose into shape, crossing all the i’s and dotting all the t’s, or something like that. And, of course, thanks to all the behind-the-scenes people who chipped in with help I’m not even aware of. I’d also like to thank my niece, Miranda Chapman, for allowing me to jumpstart her modelling career by using her beautiful image to illustrate the internal structure of the atom.

Finally, I’d like to thank a few others who made important contributions: Jon Williams and John Barrowman of EFX-TEK for providing the prop controllers used in several of the chapters; Light-O-Rama for providing the lighting controller used in Chapter 3 of Book VIII; and my good friend Dave Youngs, who parted with a very fine 100mm macro lens for the duration of the project.

–Doug

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

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