Freely Redistributable Resources    (AKA Free Books and Software On-Line)

In an effort to better focus the material, make the best use of lab resources, and reduce book costs to students; a series of textbooks and laboratory manuals have been developed at MVCC for use in our Electrical Engineering Technology and related courses. These replace the formerly used materials which, in some cases, were over $200 each, in paperback. A description of the collection can be found here. The materials listed below are available to anyone, free of cost. The following titles are copyright by the author, Professor Jim Fiore, and use a Creative Commons license. The author thanks the MVCC community for their support of these projects. PDF is the ".pdf" portable document format version, ODT is the ".odt" open document text format which is editable by Open Office and other word/document processors, HTML is an online version (thanks to LibreTexts), and PRINT links to Amazon for a printed copy at a very modest price. For e-book and other formats, consider using Calibre for conversions (see software links under OER From Other Sources below for descriptions, or just go here: Open Office  Calibre).

The works below are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you are enrolled in one of my courses, please see my home page for links to course pages which cover topic and lab schedules, assessment standards, homework assignments, problem sets, lecture notes, links to free supplement texts by other authors and the like. If you have difficulty accessing the files below, try using my main mirror site or my other mirror site. Links to course-specific OER (including software) created elsewhere can be found at the bottom of this page.

DC Electrical Circuit Analysis: A Practical Approach:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT
AC Electrical Circuit Analysis: A Practical Approach:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT
Semiconductor Devices: Theory & Application:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT
Operational Amplifiers & Linear Integrated Circuits/3E:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 
Embedded Controllers Using C and Arduino/2E: PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 

Laboratory Manual for DC Electrical Circuit Analysis:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 
Laboratory Manual for AC Electrical Circuit Analysis:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 
Laboratory Manual for Semiconductor Devices: Theory & Application:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 
Laboratory Manual for Operational Amplifiers & Linear Integrated Circuits/3E:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 
Laboratory Manual for Embedded Controllers Using C and Arduino/2E:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT  
Laboratory Manual for Computer Programming with Python, Multisim & TINA/4E: PDF   ODT   PRINT 
Laboratory Manual for Science of Sound:  PDF   ODT   HTML   PRINT 

The workbooks below are condensed versions of the DC and AC Circuit Analysis texts with roughly the same problem sets.
Workbook for DC Electrical Circuits:  PDF   ODT   PRINT 
Workbook for AC Electrical Circuits:  PDF   ODT   PRINT

For convenience, all print versions can be found on my author's page: www.amazon.com/author/jimfiore

OER From Other Sources

Licenses vary across these titles but they are free for non-commerical use. Some use a Creative Commons license, some use the GNU Public License and some use other means. 

Texas Instruments/DesignSoft's free simulator, runs under Windows: TINA-TI (www.ti.com/tool/tina-ti)

Linear Technology's free simuator, runs under Windows: LT-SPICE (www.linear.com/designtools/software/)

Soundcard Oscilloscope (Windows) uses your soundcard (mic/line input) to create a dual channel oscilloscope suitable for audio frequencies (sines below 20 kHz, square waves below a few kHz). There are other limitations set by the sound card, namely, a limit on the maximum input amplitude and potential issues of excessive loading due to the input impedance of the audio circuitry (probably just a few kilo ohms), but it's worth a look. Also generates sines and other waveforms via the soundcard output. You'll need to buy/make appropriate cables (typically computers use 1/8" stereo plugs). Free for educational use: https://www.zeitnitz.eu/Scope_en

You don't have to use MS Office. Here are two good office suites that include a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, etc., and best of all, they're free, open and multi-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS) :  http://www.openoffice.org/ and https://www.libreoffice.org/. I use Open Office for most of my work and it's the primary tool I used to create my OER texts.

Calibre is an extensive e-book format converter and manager. It is free, open source, and runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS. Convert your PDFs into Kindle, Nook, EPub, and other formats.

SciDAVis is an excellent, easy to use, free, multi-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS) data plotting and visualization application.

Octave is a mathematical tool very similar to Matlab. It uses the GNU Public License and runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS and BSD. 

If you need graph paper for your courses, here is a utility that generates several different kinds of graph paper using your printer. It runs under Windows. This is a self-extracting zip file (about 400k): gpaper.exe You can also create your own graphpaper online. For three cycle semi-log landscape paper go to http://www.incompetech.com/graphpaper/logarithmic and set paper to other (11 x 8.5), x axis to 3 cycles, and y axis to linear. Try 4 lines per inch and include fine lines. Other kinds of paper are available also.

XnView is a graphics file viewer and editor. Free for non-commerical use, it is great for manipulating the image files that are generated by the digital sampling oscilloscopes in labs AB216, AB218, AB286, etc. (such as scaling, rotating, color inversion, etc. for insertion into lab reports). It's also good for doing screen captures so that you can grab the circuit and analysis windows of circuit simulators and insert them into reports. This is much more powerful than MS Paint.

You may wish to download this free "Virtual Minirator" sound generator software (Windows). This uses your computer's sound card to emulate an NTI Minirator (similar to what we have in lab). Useful for Circuits 2, Linear, Op Amps, Science of Sound, etc.

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