Muscle to micro servo circuit

What's the web link for the actual course?

Their work is really poor. They have all their battery symbols with the wrong polarity. Also they don't know how to draw a decent schematic : (

If you're looking for circuits with ~100% chance of working, then this website is really good, lots of beginner circuits: https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/50%20-%20555%20Circuits/50%20-%20555%20Circuits.html

shabaz said:

Also they don't know how to draw a decent schematic

Did you also learn at school that when you have a cross on a schematic, it is not a connection node (unless for some drawing styles, where it has a big dot on it)?

Exactly that. Personally I don't ever draw a dot on a crossing, since the dot is easy to miss when looking at a small printout or zoomed-out image on the screen, but a lot of circuits do that dot on crossing style, sometime with the hump bridge on the lines that are definitely not crossed. But when there's no hump, it's hard to tell if the rest are using dots or not, if the dots are very small : ( Maybe I'm being too fussy, since it was kind of clear that pins 8 and 4 were connected together. Maybe harder for a beginner.

Just noticed the capacitor symbol is interesting too.. the plates are touching. But perhaps that too is being pedantic! 

Exactly that. Personally I don't ever draw a dot on a crossing, since the dot is easy to miss when looking at a small printout or zoomed-out image on the screen, but a lot of circuits do that dot on crossing style, sometime with the hump bridge on the lines that are definitely not crossed. But when there's no hump, it's hard to tell if the rest are using dots or not, if the dots are very small : ( Maybe I'm being too fussy, since it was kind of clear that pins 8 and 4 were connected together. Maybe harder for a beginner.

Just noticed the capacitor symbol is interesting too.. the plates are touching. But perhaps that too is being pedantic! 

one of the biggest troubles with the dot, was that 

• it often got lost when using a photocopier
• line crossings got smurky when using a photocopier, and looked like a dot.

I used to always break the line at the crossing point into two 45degree connections to avoid any confusion.

I was looking for examples, and this one with the angled line works well. They were definitely more creative in the past with best explaining their circuits.

However this one in the same book is not so good:

Still, can't blame them too much, since it was clearly hand-inked, and mistakes can be made. But for sure when I was a beginner, that transistor circuit diagram would have confused me.

Nowadays at least we have CAD.. although I still came up with a mess here.. it's a mixer layout that was started but never finished:

At least the crossings are at an angle, but it's really hard to follow regardless. Also, this was done in EAGLE, and it doesn't understand components at 45 degrees.. I don't know if KiCad does.

My brain just melted . For some reason it works well with rectifiers and Wheatstone bridges.

Hehe just a irritatingly complicated diagram to show that the left side input gets alternatively inverted to the right side, based on the two out-of-phase inputs arriving from the bottom two wires.

Easiest way to see that is to notice that one of the bottom wires (the left one) is connected to the top-right FET and the lower-left FET gates. Whereas the other bottom wire is connected to the other two diagonal FET gates. 

The aim was to chop the left side input, based on the frequency arriving from the local oscillator which is connected at the bottom.

A bit more work and one could get a nice artistic drawing.