How To: Understand the basics of electronics with a 28-280 kit

In this five-part video tutorial series, you'll learn the fundamentals of working with electronics. To follow along, you'll need a 28-280 Electronics kit from RadioShack.

You can skip to lesson 1 if you (a) have experience with a bread board and caring for electronic chips, (b) don't want to know what will be covered in this course, or (c) don't want to cover the basics.

In the first episode, you'll learn how to build a blinking light circuit using a microchip. This complex circuit is just to show you how to properly hook up all different kinds of components. In later lessons, will learn how the IC chips actually work.

In the second lesson, you'll learn how to build a tone generator, (that you can adjust at will) with 555 IC microchip. This complex circuit is just to show you how to properly hook up all different kinds of components.

In the third lesson, you'll learn what switches are and what they do.

In the fourth lesson, you'll cover resistors and potentiometers as well as Ohm's law.

For more information on any or all of the above topics, watch this video electronics primer.