This week, we started from scratch and learned the basics of electricity and circuit-building. After reading about the laws of electricity and familiarizing myself with the components in our kit, I was able to start building circuits in Lab 2.
The simplest exercise was to make a LED light up using a power source (here I’m using the Arduino Nano), a 220kΩ resistor, and an LED. After dealing with some trouble with a bad breadboard and a different resistor (I’ve learned you have to really pay attention to the color of the lines), I was able to get my light to shine brightly!
Other tasks in this lab were to add a switch and place LEDs in parallel. The switch stops and starts the flow of current to the LED, while putting them in series dimmed them considerably since they now needed to share the same amount of voltage.
Baby’s first circuit!
Using a simple switch to control the LED
Using a simple switch to control the LED
Two LEDs in series!
In lab 3 we were introduced to using the multimeter. After running through a few duds on the floor, I was able to snag one that worked, and measured the voltage, current and resistance of various components in a circuit.
Finally, in Lab 4 we focused on different kinds of switches and the ways you can arrange them. We were also tasked with designing our own type of switch, so I used tinfoil, jumper wires, and tape with a Rubik’s cube to create my imaginative, if not impractical, switch for my circuit.
Only by solving the cube does the LED light up— in this case, though, it’s not a very hard cube to solve!
Overall, I had a fun time working through all of these circuits, and it gave me a good grasp of the physics behind everything. Reading about the rest of the components and their abilities makes me excited for what we’ll do next!
