Tech note: making your own V-I plots at home

When working on my latest book, The Secret Life of Circuits, I wanted to keep the artwork real. My main 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 “based on 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 no 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.A snippet from the sample chapter, available here.Most of it was straightforward to capture, but I can’t say the same about the parametric plots that show the relationship between voltage and current in semiconductor devices. In some portions of the…