08/10/2012
So I have officially completed the electronics kit I have been working on, (which only was the first two chapters of the entire book), but at least it is some progress. I will need to get the next kit in order to continue with working on this book and learning more about circuits and such. Today, the experiments I did were all on a breadboard thankfully, so they were not really difficult at all. The first one I finished was using a transistor in it, so i had to read all about the three different leads on the device and use it correctly in the circuit in order for it to light an led when i applied the power. It was originally connected all on the breadboard, but I also had to use my finger to touch a a couple wires, which also lit the led without the bread board connecting all the wires. So my finger basically supplied a connection between the two wires, which can be seen on the pictures page of the blog. The next, and last experiment, was probably the most complex one so far, starting out using an led, a couple resistors, a transistor (which there are two different kinds I had to use), and a capacitor. I got to learn what exactly the capacitor does by using a push button in the previous experiment and measuring the voltage inside the capacitor rise, so I learned that it will basically store as many volts as the power source has until it is discharged. Anyway, the last experiment started out a bit simple, using all of the items I said above in order to make an led flash repeatedly when power was supplied. But after that I had to include in the circuit, more resistors, transistors, and even a loudspeaker in order to make basically an alarm that will make sound and flash when power was supplied. The circuit continued to expand because in order to make the loudspeaker work better and get louder, more resistors and transistors were needed, so it became pretty complex. Unfortunately the loudspeaker did not work properly because a wire that would have gone into the speaker came out and i could not fix it so it never got to produce a sound. But i set up the whole circuit nonetheless. From these experiments and the make kit so far I have learned more than I ever did about wires and electronics than I ever have before, and I cannot wait for the next project of mine I will take on in order to further my knowledge of everything.