Ohm's law without hand-waving
A practical guide to voltage, current, resistance, power, and the assumptions behind the most-used equation in electronics.
Lab Notes
Educational notes from the Albion bench.
Practical explanations, tutorials, and technical posts across electronics, maths, programming, tools, and 2D games.
Published notes
A practical electronics learning path.
These notes move from first principles into components and then into small circuits that appear constantly in real design work.
Resistors: more than just Ohm's law
Resistance value, tolerance, power rating, pull-ups, pull-downs, current sensing, and the real decisions behind a simple part.
Choosing an LED resistor properly
How to choose current, resistor value, and power rating for LED indicator circuits without relying on habit or guesswork.
Capacitors: storage, filtering, and decoupling
How capacitors behave in power rails, timing, filters, and signal circuits, with practical notes on real-world limits.
Inductors without the mystery
Energy storage, saturation, DCR, switching regulators, EMI filtering, and what happens when coil current changes.
Series and parallel resistance
The practical rules behind equivalent resistance, voltage division, current sharing, power, tolerance, and debugging.
Voltage dividers and why they sometimes betray you
Divider maths, loading, ADC source impedance, wasted current, tolerance, and when a divider is the wrong tool.
Transistors as switches
Using BJTs and MOSFETs to control loads from logic pins, including base resistors, gates, flyback, and safe defaults.
Op-amps without the hand-waving
Feedback, buffers, amplifiers, input range, output swing, bandwidth, offset, and when a comparator is the better part.
Common op-amp configurations
Voltage followers, non-inverting and inverting amplifiers, active filters, current sensing, and when a comparator is the better tool.
Subject areas
Technical notes for practical learning.
Lab Notes follows the same domains as Albion: electronics, maths, programming, tools, and game systems.
Circuits, boards, and prototypes
LEDs, power budgets, sensors, PCB bring-up, debugging, connectors, and practical design choices.
Maths that helps build things
Ratios, timing, signals, geometry, probability, estimation, and the calculations behind tools.
Code for devices and tools
Firmware patterns, state machines, small web utilities, data formats, testing, and automation.
2D systems and play
Tilemaps, input feel, animation timing, collision, level structure, game tools, and dev notes.
Article style
Clear explanations tied to practical work.
Lab Notes are written to connect first principles with the kind of design choices that appear on real benches, boards, tools, and games.
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Start from the concept
Explain the idea without assuming the reader already knows the vocabulary.
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Show the practical limits
Include tolerance, loading, heat, noise, timing, or other details that change real outcomes.
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Connect to tools
Point to calculators and formula helpers where a reader can try the numbers.
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Keep it useful
Prefer examples, checks, and judgement over filler or abstract definitions.
More topics
Practical subjects for deeper explanation.
Pull-up and pull-down resistors
How digital inputs end up floating, and how a resistor gives them a defined state.
What happens during PCB bring-up
A practical walkthrough of first power-on, measurement, and debugging.
State machines in firmware
A clear explanation of why simple states make embedded behavior easier to trust.
Tilemaps for small 2D games
A game-dev note connecting grid logic, collision, and readable level design.
Study areas
Useful ideas across electronics, firmware, maths, and games.
These areas are good foundations for understanding how small systems behave, why designs fail, and how tools make decisions easier.
Diodes and protection clamps
Rectifiers, Schottky parts, Zeners, TVS diodes, flyback paths, and simple input protection.
Regulators without wishful thinking
Linear, LDO, buck, and boost regulators, with heat, dropout, ripple, and stability in view.
Polling, interrupts, and when each makes sense
A practical comparison for buttons, sensors, timers, communication, and low-power devices.
State machines for reliable behaviour
How explicit states make firmware, UI flows, tools, and game logic easier to debug.
Units as a debugging tool
How writing units exposes mistakes in current, power, timing, speed, scaling, and conversions.
Why tile size changes game feel
How grid scale affects movement, collision, camera design, readability, and level rhythm.
Questions
Ask a technical question or request a clearer explanation.
Send a circuit, formula, programming pattern, or game-system question that would benefit from a clear practical explanation.