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General Electronics Books
Cathleen Shamieh
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Published:
March 18, 2016

Electronics For Kids For Dummies

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Overview

If your youngster likes to tinker, Electronics For Kids For Dummies is here to teach them the core concepts of electronics in a fun and engaging way. Written in a language elementary-to-middle-school-aged kids can understand, it's packed with full-color photos, easy-to-follow instructions, simple examples, and 13 cool projects that will boost your child's confidence while instilling valuable electronics lessons. Written by an experienced engineer who authored Electronics For Dummies, this friendly guide shows children the right way to learn about this excitingbut potentially dangerousfield.

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About The Author

Cathleen Shamieh is an electrical engineer and a writer with extensive engineering and consulting experience in the fields of medical electronics, speech processing, and telecommunications.

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electronics for kids for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Sharpen your circuit-building skills by finding out how to read the colorful stripes on resistors and how to make your own jumper wires. Then take a look at how batteries work so you're sure to get the most out of these common energy sources.
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You may be familiar with LEDs if you have an LED flashlight or use LED bulbs in your home. An LED, or light-emitting diode, is a device made of a special material known as a semiconductor. A diode is the simplest type of semiconductor device (meaning, component). Diodes, LEDs, and other semiconductor devices have unique properties that make them useful.
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Look at the two 2N3906 PNP transistors shown here. Do they look like the 2N3904 NPN transistor? Yup. Does it matter if you get the 2N3904 and 2N3906 transistors mixed up? Yessirree, Bob! Two PNP transistorsIn this project, you use both a 2N3904 NPN transistor and a 2N3906 PNP transistor, so you really need to keep track of which is which.
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Electrolytic capacitors are polarized, which means the way that they are connected in a circuit matters. A 470 microfarad electrolytic capacitor is shown in the figure. Electrolytic capacitors have a positive and negative side.To tell which side is which, look for a large stripe or a minus sign (or both) on one side of the capacitor.
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Sharpen your circuit-building skills by finding out how to read the colorful stripes on resistors and how to make your own jumper wires. Then take a look at how batteries work so you're sure to get the most out of these common energy sources.
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Have you ever mixed vinegar with baking soda to create a volcano for a science fair project? The bubbling that you see is the result of a chemical reaction. This reaction is very similar to how batteries work. The reaction, however, occurs inside a battery, hidden from view by the battery case. This reaction is what creates the electrical energy that the battery supplies to circuits.
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The battery's job is to provide the electrical energy needed to power the LED in your flashlight circuit. Chances are you're familiar with 9-volt batteries like the one shown. Components needed to build an LED flashlight. Explore your battery Every battery has two terminals, which are the metal pieces that stick out from the top of a 9-volt battery (see the following figure) or the metal ends of an AA, AAA, C, or D battery.
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The figure shows the front and back of one type of mini-speaker. Speakers usually come with leads attached. The leads are twisted together to keep things neat and tidy. You attach the leads to components in your circuit so that electrical current passes from your circuit into the speaker. The speaker then converts the current into sound.
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Building a single LED circuit on a breadboard is a snap! Grab one 470 ohm resistor (yellow-violet-brown), any LED, your battery with battery clip, and needle-nose pliers. Then place your breadboard on a flat surface and follow these three steps:Insert an LED into the breadboard.Using your needle-nose pliers, gently bend the leads of the LED out and down, as shown.
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A jumper wire is a short insulated wire with bare (stripped of insulation) ends. You use jumper wires, such as the one shown in the following figure, to connect two points in a breadboard circuit. Even if you have a set of precut jumper wires, chances are you'll need to make a jumper wire of a specific length for a circuit or two.
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If you think those colorful bands on your resistors are there just for show, think again! Those bands tell you the value of the resistor. Before you can decode the resistor value, you need to know a little more about resistors. There are two main types of resistors: Standard resistors have four color bands. Three of the bands tell you the nominal value, which means the value the resistor was designed to have.
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Diodes do a simple but important job: They allow current to flow in just one direction. A special kind of diode — a light-emitting diode, or LED — is often used for the purpose of, well, lighting up. You have to be careful to orient the LED the correct way, or current won't flow at all.Another kind of diode performs the important task of preventing current from flowing the wrong way in your circuit.
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A pushbutton switch is a type of tactile (meaning touch) switch, which is an on/off switch that is activated when pressure is applied to it (usually by a finger).The figure shows one type of pushbutton switch. Each of the eight switches is a normally open, momentary single-pole, single-throw (SPST) pushbutton switch.
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To limit the current that flows from a 9-volt battery through your LED, you insert a resistor in your circuit. Resistors slow down current, like a kink in a hose slows the flow of water.The figure shows you a variety of resistors. Every resistor has two leads, and it doesn't matter which way you insert a resistor into a circuit.
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Unfortunately, there isn't a store in a shopping mall close to your house where you can just walk in, pick out all the electronics parts you need, plunk down about $100, and go home and start building projects. Even RadioShack stores no longer carry a wide variety of electronic components. So, you will need to order many of your supplies online, which means you have to plan to allow time for shipping.
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General Electronics

What Is Radio?
What Is Radio?
In scientific terms, radio is the transmission of a certain kind of electromagnetic energy through the air. Electromagnetic energy is energy that is radiated (meaning emitted) by an object and travels in waves, similar to the way sound is transmitted. X-rays, microwaves, visible light, and ultraviolet light (think sunburn) are other types of electromagnetic energy.
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A capacitor is a pretty simple device. It consists of two electrical conductors (known as plates) that are separated by a special type of insulator (that is, a nonconductor) known as a dielectric (pronounced "die ih LECK trick").Leads are attached to each plate and a coating or other case is placed around the capacitor.
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A photoresistor, which is also called a light-dependent resistor (LDR) or photocell, consists of a piece of semiconductor material that exhibits an interesting characteristic: It acts like a resistor except that the value of resistance depends on how much light is shining on it.You can see an assortment of photoresistors in this figure, left, and a close-up of one photoresistor on the right.
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Pot is the shortened name for a potentiometer. A potentiometer (pronounced "poe-ten-shee-AH-meh-ter") is a variable resistor. The pot enables you to vary the blink rate of the LED without changing any components in your circuit.Pots come in various shapes, sizes, and values, but they all have the following things in common: They have three terminals (or connection points).
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A schematic (pronounced "skee-mat-ick") is a diagram of a circuit. Schematics use symbols to represent circuit components and lines to show the connections between components. What schematics don't do is tell you how to arrange your circuit (or whether or not to use foam cutouts). It's up to you to decide how to lay out your circuit.
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Discrete components are individual electronic devices, such as resistors, capacitors, LEDs, and transistors. You connect the components as you build circuits. An integrated circuit (IC) contains anywhere from a few dozen to many billions (yes — billions!) of circuit components packaged in a single device that can fit into the palm of your hand.
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Capacitors are extremely useful in electronics and, chances are, you've used them many times without realizing it. Here are some places where you may have met up with capacitors: Alarm clocks: Many alarm clocks keep charged capacitors on hand in case there's a power failure. When the power goes out, the capacitor discharges — sending current through the clock circuit to keep the circuit running.
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An LED flashlight circuit uses just three components and is probably the simplest circuit you'll ever build. It's easy to package that circuit in a case so that it looks like a finished product (well, sort of — "Foam flashlights for sale! Get 'em while they last!").But as your circuits get more complicated, you'll discover that it's not always wise to create a permanent, packaged circuit right off the bat.
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To get an idea of how important a transistor is in a circuit, think about a circuit that changes the dimming time of an LED. This circuit is set up with a resistor and a capacitor to dim the light from an LED over a predictable time interval. But the longer the time interval, the less brightly the LED glows — even before it dims as the capacitor discharges!
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