Electrical devices are powered by electricity (e.g. lights, kettle, fridge, toaster). Electronic devices use electrons in a clever way (e.g. to control a robot or display like a TV).
Ohm’s law: Voltage (Volts) = Current (Amps) x Resistance (Ohms)
V = I x R
Note also that the power used by the circuit is also an important consideration, where Power (Watts) = Current (Amps) x Voltage (Ohms)
P = I x V
A good analogy to understand what these terms are. Voltage determines how much oomph you can get. The resistance indicates what is restricting the flow. The current is how much stuff is flowing.
Components
breadboards – allow you to connect items up without solder
wires – conduct electricity (diameter matters)
resistors – resist flow of electricity
potentiometers – are resistors where the user can vary the resistance
capacitors – store energy (kind of like a battery) in an electric field. They store charge and tend to smooth out changes in current.
inductors – probably won’t need these just yet, but an inductor stores energy in a magnetic field when electric current flows through it.
buttons – like switches, but only make connection when pressing
switches – allow toggling between open circuit (no flow + no activity), and closed circuit (flow + activity)
diodes – only allow current to flow in one direction (where the arrow is pointing). Note that LEDs are Light Emitting Diodes – they are a type of diode.
batteries – they store energy (typically are 1.2, 1.5, 3, 3.7, 9, 12.6V)
Circuits
There are 2 types of circuit:
series = inline
parallel = next door
Analog waves are smooth and continuous (e.g can vary anywhere between 0-1), digital waves are stepping, square, and discrete (e.g. are either 0-off, or 1-on).
Note that you can represent an analog signal digitally with PWM (pulse width modulation). This simply turns the signal ON and OFF in different amount to give an overall percentage ON.
Input devices
Input devices are things that allow you to input information to your circuit. They are also called sensors, because typically they sense something in the environment (e.g. temperature, humidity, light) and quantify how much of it there is in some way (e.g. temperature in Degrees Celcius, humidity as a % and light as light intensity or Lux). Some examples of input devices you can use in circuits are:
temperature: thermistor, thermocouple
light: LDR (light dependent resistor), or photodiode (more accurate)
distance: sonar sensor
And many others, e.g. magnetic field, acceleration, sound level, vibration, force, pressure, angle, image.
Some sensors are passive and can simply be plugged in and they change resistance with a change in property (e.g. LDR resistance changes as you change the amount of light). Other sensors are active which means they require their own circuit and power source.
Output devices
Output devices actually do something. These can be motors (DC, BLDC, servo, stepper), lights, speakers, solenoids, displays. Note that output devices sometimes need special drivers to make them work, and often the require quite a lot of power to operate and so might need a special (or separate) power source to operate.
All these information are from our study material made by our tutor Derek Covill.
Fritzing
Fritzing is an open-source initiative to develop amateur or hobby CAD software for the design of electronics hardware, to support designers and artists ready to move from experimenting with a prototype to building a more permanent circuit, and allows you to build/design a circuit in 3 formats: breadboard circuit, schematic and PCB layout.
This is my first approach with Fritzing, and here i create my first electronic circuit.
Simple LED circuit
I followed this tutorial for understand where to start with the circuit.
I then collegate the 470Ω resistor, to be fair i used the 1K resistor because i didn’t had the 470. After this i collegate the 5mm LED to the breadbord and at the end the battery clip collegate with the battery.
