Back to Basics: Ohms Law
During last night’s Open Hack Night, while trying to explain things like how transistors and mosfets work, it was discussed that maybe taking a step back and outlining some of the basics of electronics would be beneficial to everyone. So I decided to start with Ohms Law.
There are 3 things that Ohms Law deals with, and they are all related to each other. Those things are Voltage, Current and Resistance.
Voltage is measured in… well Volts of course!
Current is measured in Amperes.
Resistance is measured in Ohms! Named after this guy who put a bunch of work in discovering resistive properties electricity, and apparently came up with this relationship known as Ohms Law. Anyhoo.
I like analogy’s to help me relate things that I know, against things I don’t know. So everyone’s favorite analogy of electricity is water. Some will argue this topic to death, but for my purpose I’m sticking to it.
Voltage — So Voltage is actually a potential concept, think of a large water tank on the top of a hill and a small pipe coming out of the bottom. The difference between what is coming out of the pipe versus the pressure in the tank is the potential voltage. So voltage is the pressure.
Current — This would be the volume of water pushed through that pipe by the voltage (pressure) and would refer to the quantity of water flowing through it.
Resistance — So this would be the pipe its self. The larger the pipe (lower resistance), the easier current can flow through, thus having more current. The smaller the pipe (higher resistance), the harder it is for the current to flow through the pipe, yielding less water.