When people find out I’m not very good at building circuits, they’re shocked!
Circuits are the basic building blocks of all electrical devices – including the computer on which you are reading this right now. In EngSci’s introductory circuits course, ECE159, you’ll be introduced to circuit properties such as current, voltage, and resistance, as well as circuit components like sources, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and Op-amps. You will learn about DC (direct current) and AC (alternating current) circuits, and will use techniques like mesh analysis, nodal analysis, Thevenin equivalents, differential equations, and complex numbers to analyze circuits.
The goal of the course is to solve circuits for their properties by understanding how their components interact. These interactions are expressed mathematically, so a large portion of this course is solving systems of equations. Succeeding in the course requires understanding the theory behind circuit analysis, being able to build circuits in real life and, most importantly, knowing how to apply the right formulas in the right situations. Are you ready to learn the fundamentals of harnessing electricity?
Some students find ECE159 difficult, and some find it easy. While a high school circuit course under your belt can help you succeed in ECE159, it is not necessary, as concepts are explained very clearly and with a lot of depth. Practice and regular review will be your best friend in this course. The key is to practice the steps to answer every type of question, as there are only a handful of distinct questions that can be asked on a test. Also, although electricity can be more difficult to comprehend than larger, mechanical systems, try your best to develop intuition for the concepts in a way that works for you.
Professor
Professor Micah Stickel
Professor Micah Stickel is a Teaching Stream Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his Undergrad, Masters, and PhD at U of T with a focus on electromagnetic networks and developing new devices for high-frequency systems. He is a returning professor for this course and is well-known for his incredibly clear and engaging presentation, his insightful worked examples, and the occasional joke in lecture! In general, Prof. Stickel lectures are well worth attending as they teach exactly what you will need to know to succeed, in a way that everyone will be able to understand!
Professor Interview
“The heart of the course is really about problem solving […] It’s really about understanding how circuits behave with the hope that once you develop the ability to analyze circuits, then you can design circuits, and that’s the power that math and science together bring to engineering.”
“For [students] who go into [mechatronics, robotics, or any combination of software and hardware], the core ideas [of circuits] will come back. […] They’re really critical ideas.”
“I’ve described engineers as master approximators. […] To analyze [an electric circuit] we’d need Maxwell’s equations, the fundamentals of electromagnetics, and vector calculus, which [results in a] difficult problem. […] We don’t need to think of [the circuit] at an atomic level [and can] approximate it with a resistor, capacitor, or inductor […] Electric circuits are fundamentally just approximations of a real-world system”
Course Highlights
- Labs! Every other week you’ll have the chance to create circuits on breadboards. Be ready not only to build circuits but to have fun.
- Have you ever looked at a circuit diagram and thought, “I wish I knew what this all meant”? Well, you will be able to interpret and analyze many different types of circuits after ECE159!
- This course will introduce you to using complex numbers to model real systems!
Week in the Life of an ECE159 Student
Classes
There are typically three hours of ECE159 lectures a week. Be sure to pay attention during these lectures: this is where you learn about the circuit laws you will use to solve problems on assignments. In lectures, your prof will conceptually explain circuit topics, as well as go through many examples of circuit analysis. Note these examples, as they serve as models for midterm and exam questions. Similarly to MAT185, you must watch a 20-minute video and complete an online quiz before attending each lecture. Make sure to do these, as they are crucial to developing intuition, and lectures will be much more fast-paced and in-depth. They are also worth marks!
Ensure you attend every lecture, as throughout the semester, there will be multiple in-class quizzes which will require you to solve a couple of assignment-style questions.
There is one hour of ECE159 tutorials built into your weekly schedule. During the tutorial, the theory of the course will be briefly summarized. However, the emphasis during the tutorials is on learning how to problem-solve. Your TA will work through lots of different examples, and we recommend taking notes of their problem-solving steps. ECE159 TAs are extremely helpful, so make sure to pay attention!
ECE159 labs are held biweekly. Make sure to do the pre-labs before every lab session, as they are worth marks but are also crucial to your ability to understand the lab. They can be a time crunch because the whole lab is done in a three-hour period. During this time, you’ll build circuits in the lab and observe their properties with different electrical instruments such as oscilloscopes.
Assessments
Throughout the semester, you will be assigned five online problem sets consisting of topics covered during the previous two weeks of class. These questions can become difficult, but they are excellent practice for the exams. Every week, you will also be provided with some textbook problems for additional practice.
ECE159 has a midterm and a final exam. They consist of five circuit analysis questions, and each question can be thought of as multiple difficult assignment questions packed into one. For both exams, you will be permitted to bring a single double-sided handwritten aid sheet.
How to Succeed
Quick tips and equations
- Passive Sign Convention: if positive current flows out of the positive side of a voltage, then the element is delivering power. Otherwise, it is absorbing power.
- Consider the hydraulic analogy, where voltage and current are analogous to water pressure and flow of water, respectively.
- V = IR (Ohm’s Law) P = VI (Electric Power)
- Any voltage or current in a circuit can be written as:
- v(t) = v(\infty) + [v(0) - v(\infty)]e^{-t/\tau} or
- i(t) = i(\infty) + [i(0) - i(\infty)]e^{-t/\tau}
- You will learn how to use complex numbers to model AC circuits. Normally, this would involve many difficult computations. However, certain types of Faculty-approved calculators can perform almost any complex calculation for you!
- Remember that circuit analysis is a mere representation of the physical world; if during a lab your data is not exactly as you had expected, do not worry! Small sources of error are common.
More Details
Technically speaking, you could get through this course just by knowing nodal and mesh analysis. However, you will waste considerable time on questions if they’re all that you use. Pay attention to concepts that can speed up your problem solving. Examples include the fact that parallel branches have the same voltage, or that certain Op-amp configurations are designed to perform addition, subtraction, differentiation, and integration.
The best way to remember the equations and how they connect is by writing an equation sheet as the course moves on. This will also be a helpful resource when you work through the homework problem sets, and on the exams, you will be allowed a single double-sided handwritten aid sheet!
This course is about problem-solving, which means the more questions you practice, the more you will succeed. The lectures are also designed to be very interactive and will focus on working through lots of examples. Find past ECE159 midterms and exams on courses.skule.ca.
Like classical mechanics, which you’ll learn in PHY180, introductory circuits is a very old and standard course. There are many online videos and textbooks that you can use if you’re struggling with a concept and need a new perspective.
Beyond First Year
- You’ll get crucial experience in building circuits, which is important in engineering prototyping (you will likely need this in Praxis III, in your second year, and you can use these skills on design teams and for personal projects).
- This course will provide a foundation for all upper-year electrical engineering courses and the coursework for majors such as ECE and Robotics.
- Even if you don’t find electronics interesting, the problem-solving skills you develop in this course will be used heavily in future courses with many connected concepts and equations, such as thermodynamics.