Also, Colour-Coding is Great
Now that I had made the world's most useless circuit, it was time to make a useful one!
The bulk of the text in this chapter of Make: Electronics was dedicated to teaching about resistance and resistors, especially learning to identify them by their colour-codes. I just love things like that! It's so insanely fun to read the bands and figure out the value, then probe the resistor with a multimeter to see if I'm right! Clearly my nerdness is showing, but I'm in good company, right? Right?
There was a brief aside first, though, as I tested the voltage of the batteries individually, and then again in series, and discovered that they were indeed 1.5 volt batteries, adding to 6 volts together. For some reason this filled me with joy.
The bulk of the text in this chapter of Make: Electronics was dedicated to teaching about resistance and resistors, especially learning to identify them by their colour-codes. I just love things like that! It's so insanely fun to read the bands and figure out the value, then probe the resistor with a multimeter to see if I'm right! Clearly my nerdness is showing, but I'm in good company, right? Right?
There was a brief aside first, though, as I tested the voltage of the batteries individually, and then again in series, and discovered that they were indeed 1.5 volt batteries, adding to 6 volts together. For some reason this filled me with joy.
(As an aside: when I do computer programming, it's imperative that I have a debugger handy, which is a tool for inspecting your code as it's executing to understand what's really going on inside your program. I often wax on about how utterly essential a debugger is for programming and that people who don't use one are muddling around in caves. On previous attempts to get into circuitry I had gone at it without a multimeter, and I realize now that it's the debugger of the hardware world, and it's utterly foolish to go in without one! So that's probably a big part of why I'm so thrilled to just use it and measure my batteries: I like it when my projects tell me whether they're working or not.)
Anyways, the goal of the project was to light an LED with different values of resistors in front of it and see what happened. I tried with a 2000 ohm, 1000 ohm, and 470 ohm resistor, and as you might expect, the light was brighter the less resistance there was.
With this simple test out of the way, it's time to test my limits.
Anyways, the goal of the project was to light an LED with different values of resistors in front of it and see what happened. I tried with a 2000 ohm, 1000 ohm, and 470 ohm resistor, and as you might expect, the light was brighter the less resistance there was.
With this simple test out of the way, it's time to test my limits.