Is anyone using a physical system to model electronics in their heads, like visualizing electricity as water, or a circuit as water pipes, resistance as friction, capacitance as a spring, and inductance as inertia?
What are you actually seeing in your heads when dealing with electronics, because I really don’t see anything concrete, just electrical terms, words and formulas?
What an interesting problem... how to "visualize" electronics. I don't visualize electronics. I apply what i have learned. Learning comes in many forms, so your mileage (or kilometers) may be different from mine. I learned to read beyond "Run, Spot, run!" (although I started there) at a very early age because my mom bought Little Golden Books for me to read. Prior to learning to read though, I had to learn my ABCs. All that happened before I reached kindergarten,,, years before. Mother told me I was "reading" by age two. I've been reading (and learning) ever since. But, although "book learning" is the way civilization records and advances technology, it doesn't replace the "hands on" experience this forum supports.
Troubleshooting is a distinct and separate skill from repairing. Ideally, you troubleshoot by forming an
opinion of what is wrong and making a list of what is causing the problem, Then you
test those opinions (each of which are really just an hypothesis) to see if any can be falsified. If it CAN be falsified, cross that opinion off the list and test the next one. Wash, rinse, repeat.
If you go through the entire list and nothing results, you need to come up with a better opinion of what could be wrong. Here's an example: I once built a bread-board prototype of a complex analog circuit requiring several op-amps (operational amplifiers). In testing the circuit's operation I would inject signals and try to trace the signal throughout the circuit. Problem: the signal that i measured was nowhere near resembling a function of the signal I injected.
I spent the better part of an afternoon injecting signals and wondering why the signal that I measured didn't agree with what I thought it should be. The circuit did not appear to be "dead" but the measurements were wrong. Late in the day, a fellow technician came over to my bench, curious to know why I was spending so much time "troubleshooting" my breadboard circuit. Then he dropped a bombshell: "Why is your plus and minus fifteen volt bench power supply turned off?"
In troubleshooting you have to always keep an open mind. And make sure the flaky equipment is actually receiving the power it needs to operate. This "process of elimination" method of troubleshooting becomes second-nature if you practice it long enough. It has only failed me when the problem is intermittent. Troubleshooting intermittent problems is a whole different can of worms. But that's where chart recorders and data acquisition systems shine. It can take a very long time to discover why an intermittent problem occurs.
And just when you think you have solved the problem, it appears in a slightly different form and you have to start all over again. If this happens too often to you, it might make sense to seek another career. Since I am now retired, I can "move on" to doing something else if an intermittent problem occurs. For example, I have outdoor lighting that is turned on at night by a passive infrared detector that senses motion. Yet, sometimes the lights come on and there is no sign of what triggered that response. I suspect it is a small nocturnal animal running across the yard, but have never seen one for confirmation. Do I troubleshoot this "problem" or do I ignore it? After all, the motion sensors DO work as advertised. Is it worth spending an hour or so adjusting the sensitivity so small animals don't create "false positives"? NO, not as long as the next-door neighbors don't complain about my lights coming on during the wee hours of the morning.
I used to work with a fellow who had retired from the Navy as an electronics technician. I was not impressed with his lack of skills. But I was the one who got fired when the company that hired me removed the reason for hiring me. The ex-Navy guy followed soon afterward because I am "pretty sure" he was hired to replace me and since they no longer needed me, they no longer needed him either. C'est la vie.
