An Introduction to Electrical Engineering with Lab Activities

This book has the dual goals of teaching difficult fundamental concepts in a way that will set them up for success in later courses while also providing the context for those concepts relative to the advances in electrical engineering technology.

Electrical engineering is an extremely broad and fast-changing profession that is rooted in many difficult concepts. Students might have a difficult time appreciating the relevance of the fundamental concepts that they are asked to grasp early in their education. Many difficult concepts are obscured by the traditional use of mathematics early in the treatments without sufficient exposure to the underlying meaning of the equations. This book has the dual goals of teaching difficult fundamental concepts in a way that will set them up for success in later courses while also providing the context for those concepts relative to the advances in electrical engineering technology. The topics covered are basic electricity, laboratory bench equipment, the power grid and residential wiring, complex impedance, time and frequency domains, filters, phasors, radio-frequency electromagnetic waves, modulation, semiconductor materials and devices, light emission, energy and power, energy efficiency, digital signal processing, Nyquist criterion, aliasing, battery technology, and power supplies. Traditionally, electrical engineering students are first given a course in circuit analysis; this is not such a book but does include enough background on circuits that the book can mostly stand alone. Each chapter takes on an important practical topic that helps to advance the students’ basic skill set, including sophisticated laboratory activities. The book may stand alone as a textbook with the lab parts providing even more context and understanding, even if students do not actually do those lab activities.