Tech note: making your own V-I plots at home
An electronics enthusiast details his methodology for creating accurate V-I plots for semiconductor devices at home to avoid the inaccuracies found in textbooks. He explains the use of benchtop multimeters and pulsed power to manage thermal drift and capture precise data.
Why it matters
This provides a practical, high-fidelity approach for hobbyists and engineers to verify theoretical electronics concepts with real-world data.
15 6 1 Share When working on my latest book, The Secret Life of Circuits , I wanted to keep the artwork real. My beef with the diagrams in popular electronics textbooks and online tutorials is that most of them are fake. At best, they’re retraced from ancient texts; at worst, they’re sketched from memory and can be charitably described as “inspired by true events” :
An assortment of V-I plots for diodes, collected on the internet. The Secret Life of Circuits contains about 290 original illustrations and does its best to avoid such shenanigans. I painstakingly gathered real data for everything from quartz crystal frequency response, to battery discharge curves, to signal reflections in a 100 ft run of coax cable strewn around the workshop, to the behavior of vacuum tubes.
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