Chapter 2. Essential Electronics

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.

—Dave Barry, American humorist

Although this is a book primarily about instrumentation software, we must also consider what the software is interacting with in the physical world—in other words, the hardware aspects of instrumentation. This chapter is intended to provide a general high-level overview of electricity and basic electronics from an instrumentation perspective, without delving too deeply into the theory and physics behind it all.