Circuit Building Reflection
By: Yashish Rana
Brief Introduction To This Reflection
What I Have Done
What I Have Learnt
While building circuits, I was also able to learn more detailed information on specific components such as resistors and transistors. Since many of the circuits I built required different resistors, they helped me learn and practice how to determine the correct value of resistance a resistor has by looking at the colour of it's bands. I also learned a lot about transistors because they were key components in the various circuits I had built such as the Logic Probe Circuit. I not only learned about how the transistor was invented in 1947 by William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, but I also learned about the basic purposes of transistors, their physical representation, their different pins (Emitter, Base and Collector) and the different types of transistors such as the NPN and PNP types.
Building the Logic Probe Circuit helped me learn about how logic probes are test instruments used extensively in digital electronics, to check the logic levels (0v/5v, Low/High, Off/On) of inputs and outputs. I also learned that Logic Probes can be built as circuits on a breadboard to troubleshoot and check other circuits. The 555 Timer Circuit helped me learn more about capacitors and how they can be used to change the speed of alternately flashing LEDs. Finally, the Transistor Lab circuits not only helped me learn more about transistors but they taught me that having more inputs in a circuit increases the number of outcomes that the circuit can have and that the formula 2 to the power of the number of inputs in a circuit can be used to determine the number of possible outcomes that the circuit can have.