The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

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  • Squidwrench Electronics Workshop: Session 5 Whiteboards

    Whiteboards from the SqWr Electronics Session 5, covering transistors as switches …

    Reviewing I vs V plots, starting with a resistor and then a transistor as a current amplifier:

    SqWr Electronics 5 - whiteboard 1
    SqWr Electronics 5 – whiteboard 1

    Reminder of why you can’t run a transistor at its maximum voltage and current at the same time:

    SqWr Electronics 5 - whiteboard 2
    SqWr Electronics 5 – whiteboard 2

    A resistor load line, with power calculation at the switch on and off coordinates:

    SqWr Electronics 5 - whiteboard 3
    SqWr Electronics 5 – whiteboard 3

    Detail of the power calculations, along with a diagram of the current and voltage when you actually switch the poor thing:

    SqWr Electronics 5 - whiteboard 3 detail
    SqWr Electronics 5 – whiteboard 3 detail

    Oversimplification: most of the power happens in the middle, but as long as the switching frequency isn’t too high, it’s all good.

    Schematic of the simplest possible switched LED circuit, along with a familiar mechanical switch equivalent:

    SqWr Electronics 5 - whiteboard 4
    SqWr Electronics 5 – whiteboard 4

    We started with the “mechanical switch” to verify the connections:

    SqWr Session 5 - Switched LED breadboard
    SqWr Session 5 – Switched LED breadboard

    Building the circuitry wasn’t too difficult, but covering the function generator and oscilloscope hookup took far more time than I expected.

    My old analog Tek 2215 scope was a crowd-pleaser; there’s something visceral about watching a live CRT display you just don’t get from the annotated display on an LCD panel.

    I’d planned to introduce capacitors, but just the cap show-n-tell went well into overtime. We’ll get into those in Session 6, plus exploring RC circuitry with function generators and oscilloscopes.