Off to the races: debugging! What are voltage, current and resistance? How are they related? And why should I care? In this chapter, you will learn about voltage, current and resistance and how they interact with each other. This will help you understand how your circuits are working, and how to make adjustments to them. […]
Read More →Build the circuit step by step In order to build the basic circuit described in this chapter, you’ll need the following parts. You’ll need these parts: 2 red LEDs 1 220 ohm resistor (red, red, brown, gold) Jumper wires Breadboard. Arduino Uno USB A-B cable Computer with Arduino IDE This circuit is quite similar to […]
Read More →Electricity is flowing electrons This discussion of electricity is simplified, and relevant to the small scale electronics projects that we are building. We’ve provided some references to more thorough discussions of electricity in appendix xx. Electricity is the flow of electrons through a material. Electricity requires a closed loop to flow from beginning to end. […]
Read More →Voltage:the potential In our water system, water has a potential to fall from the upper tank, moving through the turbine to the lower tank. When the water gets to the lower tank, it has no more potential to fall (because it’s already at the lowest point in the system). If we increase the amount of […]
Read More →Current: the amount of water flowing In our water system, we can measure the amount of water that flows through the pipes. If we measure a cross section of one of the pipes at any point, we can figure out how much water passes through it in a given amount of time– for example, we […]
Read More →Resistance: restricting the flow Let’s look at how resistance might be demonstrated with the water analogy. If the pipes are wider in our water system, more water can flow through them. If the pipes are narrower, less water can flow. You could say that the amount of resistance, restriction of flow, is greater in the […]
Read More →Voltage, Current, Resistance: Review Let’s look at our water analogy diagram one last time, then quickly review each of the properties we’ve just learned about, what unit it is measured in, and the symbol used to represent it. Name Description Unit Symbol voltage electromotive force, or the potential flow volts V current amount of electrical […]
Read More →How do voltage, current, and resistance interact: Ohm’s Law Voltage, Current, and Resistance are related through a formula named Ohm’s Law. Ohm’s law states that in a given circuit, the voltage (in volts) is equal to the current (in amps) times the resistance (in ohms): This equation shows us that, no matter how much pressure […]
Read More →Order of components in a circuit: Parallel Components in parallel are placed next to each other and they share electric contact points. The electricity flows along each path through the components that are arranged in parallel. Order of components in a circuit: Series In contrast, components in series follow one after another. The circuits we […]
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