One Giant Leap for Nerdkind

Tonight, I bought a breadboard. Not just any breadboard but a mini, self-adhesive, red breadboard and some red wire and a force sensitive resistor and an Arduino Uno and LabVIEW Student Edition. Now I’m just a brief 5-7 days of shipping and a few lines of code away from a force sensitive device with a graphical computer interface. Awesome.

I should mention that I also got a pretty awesome electronics mentor too.  In a previous post I mentioned this confident electonogician and since then he has mocked up, created, and tested the project that I asked him to think about.  He did all of this with stuff he already had around the house and, in 21^st century communication style, he emailed me a pair of videos as a proof of the concept.

One reason I’m excited for the potential of this project is the possibilities it can open up for me as a scientist. Scientists have always tinkered in order to blaze the technological trails that would allow them to explore the mysteries of the natural world that intrigue them.  I am a nerd and I aspire to be the best nerd I can be.  I believe electronics will help me get there.

Resistance

In electronics a resistor is like a kinked hose.  This may seem like a bad thing but if we follow the hose analogy we can think of some useful applications of this kinky situation.  Say you want to spray someone with water but, even with the spigot completely open, the water only shoots a foot from the end of the hose.  If you half kink the end of the hose you can squirt the same water several meters away and thoroughly soak your intended victim. (This is actually an example of the venturi effect but I’ll have to return to fluid dynamics another time).

An electrical resistor has many uses based on its configuration and design. In one of its simplest applications a resistor acts to slow (or resist – hence the name) electrical flow. In this situation I imagine that the resistor is like a blocked hose in which the pressure builds and causes the hose to swell.  However instead of pressure building up as in the hose, the resisted electron flow results in heat.  I had a kiln that worked in this way. The heating elements were simply coils made of a metal that didn’t allow the electricity to easily flow and the coils got hot.  The same principle can be seen in an electric stove. The glowing red coils are the result of the material resisting the electricity that is trying to flow through it.

Other uses of resistors are to modify the amount of electricity flowing though a circuit.  Here the hose is kinks so that only a small trickle can get through. For example if a power supply is 12 volts but the LED you want to light only needs 3 volts, a resistor is needed to reduce the flow to an acceptable level for the LED.  Without the resistor the 12 volts from the power supply would overload the LED and burn it out.

There are a ton of other forms of resistors and they are ubiquitous in electronics designs.  One cool one that is a bit more nuanced than simply slowing the flow or reducing it is a potentiometer.  A potentiometer is a variable resistor that allows the flow of electrons to be modified through a wide range.  This may sound weird but potentiometers are very commonplace, in fact you can probably see a potentiometer from where you are sitting right now.  So what is it? If you’ve ever said “pot” that music up, you already know an example of a “pot”entiometer.  Volume (and pretty much all other) knobs are examples of potentiometers. 

So to review, the next time your buddy is running this blog through a text recognition program so you can listen to it but the room is too loud, you might consider saying, “hey pot up that blog, I want to hear this!”

Who is This Arduino and What Did He Do With My Breadboard?

Tonight I was introduced to the exciting world of online hobbyist electronics.   I am seriously excited about this microcontrollercosm of the World Wide Web because electronics is an area in which I have a serious deficiency in knowledge.  My introduction started with a project I am working on at the office that presented a price tag in the $700 range that I thought belonged more in the $dozens. I emailed an electrical engineer friend in the morning and by lunch he responded by saying the project was as good as done. 

This is one of the main reasons I’m intrigued by the world of electronics. There is a logical confidence in the mathematical certainty of the physics on which electronics is based and the electronically literate thrive on it.  Everything is simple to electronicigician. Micro controller this, resistor that, mix in some “simple code” and suddenly a pile of pieces is a pile of blinking pieces. Add a switch and a sensor, tweak the code and it not only blinks but it automates an appliance.

I don’t know anything about this world but I’m interested and Arduino could be my ticket to tinkering. From what I understand Arduino is a microcontroller that I can attach an LED to, write a little code (or copy it from someone on the Internet) and, voilà I’ve made my own blinking pile of pieces. OK, this doesn’t sound too compelling but apparently it is foundational to making awesome stuff and I do like awesome stuff.