APPENDIX 1
Electronics and Soldering Basics
You didn’t need a lot of theory or background to create your first Arduino
projects. But it’s a good idea to learn about electricity and about soldering if
you want to build bigger and more sophisticated projects.
In this appendix, you’ll learn the basics of electricity, and you’ll learn about
Ohm’s law, which is probably the most important law in electronics. Also,
you’ll learn more about resistors, and you’ll see that soldering isn’t as difficult
as it might seem.
Current, Voltage, and Resistance
To build your first projects with the Arduino, you didn’t need to know much
about electricity. But at some point, you’ll need to understand what current,
voltage, and resistance are all about. For example, you already know that you
always have to put a resistor in front of an LED, but you might not know
exactly why, and you might not know how to calculate the resistor’s size for
a given LED. Let’s remedy that.
Electrical Circuits
An electrical circuit resembles a water circuit in many respects. In the following
figure,
1
you can see a water circuit on the left and an electrical circuit on the
right. Isn’t it fascinating how similar they are and that you can even find a
connection between them when you use a water-driven dynamo that acts as
a power supply? Let’s take a closer look at their most important attributes.
1. Lightbulb image is from Benji Park at
https://openclipart.org/detail/26218/Lightbulb_Bright-by-
bpcomp
.
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