Physical Comp 101

Last Friday I headed to soldering workshop which Carlyn was giving, actually it was an useful one, I spent the day at the shop playing with stuff. Before coming to ITP, I tought myself some basic electronics to get familiar with concepts and names and I must say they were really valuable to me to grasp what is going on here.

The setup is pretty there actually. I got my resistor connected to the side-row to make it powered since resistor is coming right from the output of the regulator. So I have this +5v and ground on next to each other on side. Next, I put a basic on/off switch to control it through first LED couples. Those LEDs are parallel to each other. You are going to notice that I am not using a resistor with those LEDs, honestly I wasn’t sure that I should use until Tom told me that because I am getting the power through a resistor at first, I am directly lowering the voltage thus preventing LEDs to blow up. The approach should be using a resistor for each LED.

Other than that in the middle of the board I connected as pot to the circuit to try how it is going to respond with those LEDs, as you will see there are three connectors coming with the potentiometer that are +,- and information. Information helps us changing the resistance in the potentiometer resulting able to change the brightness of the light.

Those lessons are learned for now. Still behind my schedule more to come.