History is about to repeat itself… With this 954′th post, I have an important announcement to make: I’m slamming on the brakes and taking a one month break away from this weblog.

It’s a bit radical and unexpected, but there is no way around it. This weblog is “driven by passion”, as you will probably know, and the crazy bit is that there’s just too much going on here to keep things going smoothly. I’ve been running behind on shop fulfillment again, and I’ve been running behind even more on answering emails and with helping out on the forum. First thing I hope this will do, is to let me catch up and regain my footing.

In sharp contrast to last year’s emergency stop, this time it’s not so much lack of ideas or lack of energy, but lack of clear focus and direction. The stories I would love to tell need more time – diving into various aspects of physical computing in considerably more depth and detail than what’s been happening on the weblog lately. And it’s not happening because the daily bite-sized cycle is chopping up my attention (even at times when I have enough weblog posts queued up for many days on end – go figure!). And maybe it’s also a hill climbing issue.

For an interesting insight about attention, see Paul Graham’s essay titled Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

I’ve updated the alphabetical and chronological indexes to all the posts on this weblog, to give you something to go through for the coming weeks. It’s a stopgap measure, but it’ll just have to do – and there should be enough to keep you interested and hopefully also pique your interest and keep you excited in the month ahead.

The difference with last year, is that I’m putting a precise cap on the duration of this “outage”: 30 days from now. That’s when this weblog will resume, probably with some announcements and adjustments to its style and format.

Talk to you one month from now!

PS. If you want to learn about electricity, then there are numerous resources on the web. Let me single out one: a 50-minute video by Walter Lewin at MIT about batteries and power (lecture 10 on this page). You can get a deep understanding of what a battery is, why its internal resistance matters, what power is, how heat comes out, what shorting a battery does, and even sparks. It’s a fantastic presentation, and the video was just picked at random!

After yesterday’s introduction, we’re ready for some more insight…

To summarize: a straight line going through (0,0) represents a purely resistive effect. The slope of the line is related to actual resistance. With resistors, once you know the voltage, you know the current (and vice versa).

Here’s a diode, i.e. a component with very specific properties (this shows why it’s called a semiconductor!):

With negative voltages, it just blocks (horizontal line, infinite resistance). With positive voltages it’s essentially a short circuit (vertical line, almost zero resistance). Note the “knee”: a diode starts conductiong at about 0.7V.

Here’s a blue LED:

Very much like a diode (the “D” in LED stands for diode, after all). Except that the knee is higher, at around 3V.

Here are three zener diodes of 3.3V, 5.1V, and 9.1V, respectively:

Note first of all that these diodes were connected in reverse compared to the diode and LED shown earlier, so the graphs are rotated by 180° compared to those. A zener is a regular diode, in that it conducts normally at around 0.7V. The difference is that when it’s blocking, it will at some point “avalanche” and start conducting anyway. This very specific voltage is what makes zeners special. But note how that avalanche knee is round and inaccurate for low voltage types. Zeners for less than 6V or so are not very precise for regulating the voltage – but 9.1V is fine.

Neat, huh? Each type of component has its distinctive analog signature when viewed on a CT!

So far, you’d be forgiven to conclude that a Component Tester is simply a hardware function plotter. With the horizontal axis being the voltage applied, and the vertical axis being the current flowing through the component.

Ah, but wait… here’s a 1 µF capacitor, showing that capacitors are fundamentally different beasts:

This is where things start to go crazy. No current at maximum and minimum voltage? Lots of current at zero volts? Positive and negative current at that zero-volt position? What’s going on here?

The thing to keep in mind is that this is not simply a function of voltage vs current. We’re applying a sine wave – a voltage which very uniformly and smoothly varies between -10V and +10V. Think of a swinging pendulum, oscillating over and over again in a constant pattern.

Note also that the component is being driven through a 1 kΩ resistor, limiting the maximum current through it. So we’re looking at the capacitor while it’s in fact part of a circuit – i.e. a 1 kΩ resistor in series with our 1 µF cap.

Let’s start at the right. The capacitor is fully charged to +10V, and our voltage is starting to decrease. When the voltage is +9V, the cap is still +10V, so it starts sending out charge in the form of current to try and regain the balance. So a positive current flows out when the voltage is at +9V. If that voltage stayed at +9V, it would soon stop, since the charge drops, and the capacitor reaches +9V equilibrium again. But as this happens, the voltage keeps on dropping. In fact, it drops faster and faster, so more and more current leaks out while catching up.

At 0V, the rate of descent (dare I say slope or derivative?) is maximal, as you can see when you like at a sine wave. So at that point, the capacitor is leaking charge as fast as it can – at the rate of 4 mA in this case.

The voltage doesn’t stop dropping, though. I keeps on dropping to -10V, although it’s slowing down again. So the current still flows out of the cap, but slower and slower. At -10V, the voltage is no longer dropping at all, and the charge will have caught up – no more current, i.e. 0 mA.

Now the roller coaster ride repeats the other way around. The capacitor has -10V charge (lack of charge, if you wish to look at it that way), and voltage is about to start rising again. This time, charge has to be fed into the cap to try and equalize voltages, and so the current is now negative.

And sure enough, the lower negative side of the circle goes through the same changes. Until we reach +10V again.

So what you’re looking at is not a function, but the path of a point in space, racing around a circular path (ok… oval, since you insist). That point in space leaves a trail on the screen, and that’s the resulting image.

Phew! Still there?

The reason this happens, is due to the fact that a capacitor has state (or memory, if you like). It will respond to an external voltage differently, depending on the amount of charge it currently holds. Applying +5V to an empty cap will generate a different current than applying +5V to a capacitor which is currently charged up to +10V, or whatever. Current will start to flow to balance things out, but this requires time.

Very loosely speaking, you could say that capacitors “live in the time domain”. Unlike resistors – which just resist the same way under any circumstance.

Here’s the trace of an inductor (the secondary coil of a small transformer in this case):

Hey, it looks like inductors also have state! And yes indeed, they do. Capacitors and inductors are very similar, electrically. They both “live in the time domain”, although through very different mechanisms.

The state of a capacitor is its current charge level, i.e. the “amount of electricity” inside it at any particular time.

The state of an inductor is the magnetic field level it has created. When you send an electric current through a coil, that coil becomes an electro-magnet, and starts generating a magnetic field around it. When the current stops, the magnetic field wants to keep going. But it can’t and it starts fading – while it does, an electric current is generated in the opposite same direction. This effect (plus a little resistance) is what causes the tilted shape shown above.

As you can see, it has the same weird effect: no current at maximum or minimum voltage, and either positive or negative current at zero volts.

The point of these little demos was to show how current and voltage stop being linearly inter-related with caps and inductors. Because they mess with time. The charge which came in today could come out tomorrow, for example.

With constant voltages, capacitors and inductors are boring. But when their time effects are pitted against voltages which change over time, then nifty things can happen. It’s probably fair to say that the discovery of DC (direct current) brought electricity to the world, whereas AC (alternating current) brought electronics to the world.

For measuring DC, you can get by with a voltmeter. For AC, you need a voltmeter-over-time, a.k.a. an oscilloscope.

I hope this gives you a feel for what’s going on in electronic circuits. The behaviors shown here are universal, i.e. caps will behave like this every time, no matter what else sits around them, and getting an intuition about how these components react to voltages is a fantastic way to figure out all sorts of more complex circuits.

There’s tons more to explore about signals and circuits: filters, phase effects, crazy stuff called “complex numbers” (values with a “real” and an “imaginary” part, go figure!), switching perspectives from the “time domain” to the “frequency domain”, and Fourier transforms. None of this matters, if all you want is to turn on a lamp or work with digital signals. But if you’ve ever wondered how electronic stuff really works: trust me… it’s fascinating.

Is anyone interested in any of this? I’d love to write a series about it one day, where intuition comes first, insight a close second, and where all the mathematics involved will become totally obvious (seriously!).

PS. Here’s my intuitive summary of what R’s, C’s, and L’s do (and what makes each of them unique):

• Resistors turn electrical power into heat (no way back with a resistor)
• Capacitors turn voltage differences into electric charge (and back)
• Inductors turn electrical current flow into magnetism (and back)

Hameg scopes have often included a “Component Tester” (CT) and mine’s no exception. It’s a really nifty way to identify a component and understand its basic characteristics. It requires a sine wave signal and an oscilloscope:

Don’t fret too long about the above circuit (copied from this PDF, which I found via Google). It’s just to show that setting up something like this is very easy – but you do need an oscilloscope with X-Y capability.

The basic idea is to apply a sine wave of say 10 VAC @ 50 Hz to the part you want to identify, and to then display voltage over versus current through that component.

My scope has the equivalent of the above simple CT circuit built in:

Two pins, on which a 50 Hz voltage is applied which varies between +10V and -10V in the form of a pure sine wave. For some reason, the scope won’t let me take screen dumps to USB in this mode, so I’ll use camera shots.

Here’s what you see with nothing connected (note the full scale: ±10 V on X and ±10 mA on Y):

The horizontal axis shows the applied voltage, and as you can see, no current is flowing. Because air insulates!

Let’s short the two pins with a copper wire (I’ve reduced the image scale to reduce this weblog post’s length):

Of course: no matter what voltage we try to put between the pins, the wire will force it to 0V, and will simply pass -10 .. +10 mA of current. As you can see in the schematic, there’s a 1 kΩ resistor in series to limit the current.

These two images of open vs shorted set the stage. Now let me insert a couple of different components, so you can see how they behave when subjected to this 10 Vpp sine wave. First, let’s insert a 1 kΩ resistor:

Make sense? Now have a look at a 10 kΩ resistor:

So what we have so far, is resistance varying from zero ohm (shorted) to infinite ohm (open), with two values in between. It all ends up as a straight line, with the slope varying from horizontal to vertical. That’s it: resistance!

If you want an explanation: this is Ohm’s law, visualized. Voltage and current are proportional, i.e. V = I x R.

So much for the basic stuff. Tomorrow, I’ll show you a couple of considerably more interesting components.