So I wanted to get back to soldering since I hadnt done it in awhile and I gave up on trying to desolder my first attempt. That braided wire just sucked. So I ended up manually removing the components from the perf board (not fun (cut finger (ouch))). So here’s my second attempt at soldering…
Category: Electronics
Doing the things with electronics
Month 1 – End of second week review
Well – what can I say, I’ve been so busy that I totally forgot to do this summary. I wanted to make sure I got it in though so here it is. Im still feeling pretty good about this month. I’ll admit that some of the things Im studying I don’t feel like I have…
Working with capacitors
Before I started all of this I knew what a capacitor was. They’re like little batteries…. sort of…. So while capacitors are pretty easy to understand, their uses cases are a little different than I had expected. So let’s take a quick look at how capacitors work. The easiest way to see this is by…
Using a potentiometer(pot)
So another one of the items that came in my kit was a potentiometer often shortened to pot (Im already sick of typing potentiometer so it will be pot from here on out). The pot is an interesting device that acts as a variable voltage divider or simply a variable resistor. Let’s take a look so you…
Voltage Dividers
We’ve already looked at resistors and saw how they can impact voltage and current in a circuit. In those cases, the resistor was placed in series with the other components. While this is a typical means to deploy a resistor, it isnt the only way they can be used. In my readings I came…
Electricity and the water analogy explained
If you’ve ever tried to understand amps, voltage, and resistance you’ve no doubt heard the water analogy. It goes something like this… Consider a tank of water. The amount of water in the tank is comparable to the amount of electrical charge in a power source. Now consider the tank has a hole in the…
Measuring voltage and current with a multimeter
While making these measurements likely seem like an obvious task to most – it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how to take these measurements. Voltage and current are measured in two very different ways. One of the big stumbling blocks for me was understanding that voltage is always constant in a circuit. That is –…
Soldering to a circuit board
Im not sure exactly what these boards should be called. I’ve read some places where they were called solder boards, other places call them breadboards, and yet other places call them prototyping boards. In either case, it’s a board that has holes through which you can insert components and then solder them to the board….
Month 1 – End of first week review
So here we are at the end of week 1. It went by fast… Despite that, I feel like I made good progress. I did get hung up on a few things as far as electrical theory goes and a couple of tool problems (more on that later) but I was able to overcome those…