Circuits with Lights

Basket of Goodies

First off, Ethan and I checked our basket of electrical goodies to make sure we had all of the parts we needed to do this and maybe future labs.   We also made sure to have the power jack we had made in the soldering lab to supply power to the breadboard.

During our inventory, we had to determine the ohms on the resistors we had been given.   We first tried by multimeter, but we didn't really know how to set the numbers and the resistors kept giving us different readings.   So then we tried by looking at the colored stripes on the resistors.   We had a bit of trouble reading the color chart and trying to figure out which colors were which but we figured it out and then labeled the sets with a pen.




Next we took our breadboard and plugged the wires from our power jack that we had made in the soldering lab into the right side of the breadboard as well as our voltage regulator to convert the battery power into only five volts.   Then we added wires to connect the power to other parts of the breadboard, two LEDs, and a voltage resistor.   Finally we connected the battery and the LEDs were lit.





After that batteries became scarce so Ethan and I decided to use the Arduino chip to supply power instead.   Since the Arduino chip only supplies a maximum of five volts, we replaced the power jack and the voltage regulator.


Then we added a small button between the resistor and the power cable.   It was a pretty simple concept: push the button to provide power, let go of the button to cut off power.   This is called an normally open momentary switch.




The last thing we did was connect a potentiometer to the circuit. We used alligator clips to connect the leads on the potentiometer to the wires connected to the breadboard and used it in place of the push button. We could then twist the knob on the resistor to make the LEDs get brighter and dimmer.