Hello. I'm Dr Ferri.
Welcome to the course on linear circuits.
This course will be taught by
two different people, myself and Nathan Parrish.
I'm a professor and associate chair for, for the school of
electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, and Nathan is a graduate student.
An overview
of the course is, well, it's on linear circuits,
which is the analysis of
circuits including resistors, capacitors,and inductors.
We're looking at two different sources, one is direct
current sources and the other is alternating current sources.
And we'll be looking at the time domain and in the frequency domain.
The target audience are people with a scientific or
technical background, who are not
necessarily electrical or computer engineers.
This course is taught in conjunction with a class
that we have at Georgia Tech that is for non-majors.
That is, students that are in, that are at
engineering, but not in electrical engineering as their primary major.
Because our course in electrical engineering goes into a
little bit more depth than the course for non-majors.
So this course would be great for someone who wants to
do review or an overview, but not quite as in depth
as a major in electrical or computer engineering would do.
Background preparation.
We expect that you have had a first course in
calculus, so that you understand how to do derivatives and integrals.
That you're familiar with matrices and linear
algebra, and you're comfortable with working with vectors.
That you've had a background in complex
numbers, and can work with complex numbers, and
that you've had some sort introduction to circuit elements
at the level that you, with CNA physics class.
The learning outcomes.
By the time that this course ends, you should be able to deter-, to
determine voltages and currents in the resistive
network, with single or multiple DC sources.
Be able to sketch the transient response of RC
and RLC circuits to step changes in the source voltage.
Be able to determine steady-state responses to sinusoidal
inputs, and this is often called AC analysis.
Be able to analyze the frequency of response of filters,
and finally be able to analyze the power of reactive circuits.
This course is divided up into five modules.
Each module builds upon itself, and here is shown
a concept map of how the different modules relate
to one another.
The background module just gives you some, you know, a short
background information that, which you might get from a physics class.
It's just a review.
And then we start with the more difficult,
or the main topics starting with resistive circuits.
Well with resistive circuits, we have to
draw some background from the background module.
And then the third module is reactive circuits, where we add capacitors and
inductors to our circuits and then we build upon some
of the analysis methods that we learned with resistive circuits.
And in addition, the frequency analysis module
leads up to the interesting topic of filters.
And we have to build upon our previous modules for that.
As we start each of these modules we will show the
concept map, we will show the specific topics within each module, and
then we will also show what we bring forward from the previous modules.
And the reason we do the concept map is we want to get
the big picture of this course and how things relate, to each other.
Here are some hints in how to succeed in linear circuits.
First and foremost, be active, take notes.
Pretend you're in a regular class, and you're taking notes.
You either take notes completely by hand, or you print out the slides and
make notes right on the slides.
Now, the slides that we provide to you are only
a help for you, in taking notes, so all of
the material we cover in the class, especially our handwritten
comments on our slides, will not be on those printed slides.
It's up to you to, to add in additional comments on those printed slides.
So to help you out, we will provide slides
and cells, as well as a document of handouts
of slides for each module. So there's a PDF of all the slides.
for given module.
Next, what we like for you to do when you take
these notes is to try to identify and organize your notes.
And organize important concepts and skills.
The last lesson for each module is called the
wrap up, and it's basically a study guide that says.
You should be able to do certain things.
You should be able to solve problems a certain way.
You should know certain facts and it lists these out.
So make sure you study those before you do each quiz for each module.
Next, people learn by testing their knowledge.
When they test their knowledge and they find that they don't know
something, then that's the time for them to go back and review.
We're helping to trigger this by
giving short quizzes in each lesson.
So every lesson, every video lesson, has a quiz in
there, multiple quiz questions, that are very basic, very conceptual ideas.
And if you don't get those cracked then you've
missed something.0 Go back and review the video again.
We also intermittently provide a pause button in our lecture.
And that pause button
is to tell you really to pause the lesson, to pause
your video, and to try answer the question that was just asked.
And this is to mimic what a professor does inside a classroom, when a
professor says, what do you think will happen if I do such and such?
Or what is the answer to this problem?
And the class has time to stop and think about it.
So we want you to do same, the same things.
Stop and think whenever we provide this pause button.
You should do the homework online. Do the quiz after every module.
And that, again, these are ways of testing your
knowledge, to make sure that you do understand it.
Another thing is to ask and answer questions in the forum.
not only asking the questions of other people, we would like for students
to have a, to be working together, have a community of online learners.
So we want you ask questions, and also try to answer other people's questions.
You'll find that you understand things a lot better if
you're able to answer and explain things to other people.
People also learn by making associations with prior knowledge.
We're trying to help this along by providing the concept
matter, and in each module, we'll be telling
you, these are the concepts that you learned
earlier in this class, and this is how
we're going to be using them in this module.
So making associations with prior knowledge, and
understanding the big picture of this course, will
help you to understand the facts and,
and problem solving skills that we're teaching you.
Also, relate this material to practical problems that
you've learned outside of this class, you know,
things that you've learned in your work experience or other personal experience.
And to help you with this, we have a lot
of lab demos, which show practical use of this material.
As lab demos are an inherent part of this class, so
there will be homework problems on there, and quiz problems as well.
So we want you to learn them for their own sake, but
also to help you identify this, and make associations of the theoretical
knowledge that we're giving you with some real practical knowledge.
So the policies for the class.
No direct email to the instructional staff.
Rather, we want you to send all questions and comments to the forum.
And the forum will be monitored.
We want only respectful and constructive comments and questions.
In addition, going to, go to the forum
to ask questions, but also to answer questions.
You'll find that you'll be able to
understand things better yourself if you try to explain it to other people.
Now this course is being taught in conjunction with the Georgia Tech course,
a regular course that we have for credit for our own students here.
And those students have a required text book, and
they have required labs that are associated with this class.
So as a courtesy to the online community, we'll be providing some of the references.
For example, I'll provide
a, a reference to this, the textbook, which is purely optional for you.
And also, I will print the labs, I'll post the
labs that we have required for our on campus students.
It's not required for you to do the labs,
but I would encourage you, if you're curious, to
buy the data acquisition board and do the labs
on your own, may help you understand the material.
And so I welcome you to this course on linear circuits, and
I'll see you in the video lectures online and also on the forum.