Book Title: Applied Electrical Engineering Fundamentals

Book Description

This on-line textbook serves as an introduction to electrical engineering concepts and applications for non- electrical & computer engineering majors.  This text was written to accompany the course ECE361 – Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This is a required course for undergraduate mechanical, biomedical, and industrial engineering majors, and students from computer science, physics, art, and other academic majors have also taken the course.  The course provides students with vocabulary and electrical/electronics analysis and design concepts in order to help them work in multi-disciplined teams designing engineered systems in their professional  careers.  The course also provides a practical introduction to electronics that should enable students to experiment with electronics in their own right as well as provide a foundation for further study in electronics. The underlying pedagogical construct behind this book is based on this idea: in order to design, we need to understand the theory, from the big picture down to the details; we also need practice and confidence.  This book introduces a set of electrical/electronics topics theoretically and provides the usual pencil and paper problems to practice the theory. This is followed by a series of  hands-on experiments designing, building and testing circuits. These circuit experiments are designed to help students reinforce,  make sense of, and gain confidence in their of learning of the theory.  The experiments involve circuits that blink, beep, buzz, detect the environment, spin motors, steer tiny cars, run software and interface to the external world. Learning about and building things with electronics can be, and should be, enjoyable. This text, therefore, takes an approach that is intended to make learning about electrical engineering fundamentals fun.