Late Night Soldering: Wind

Intro

poetry and electricity

Before we go any further, I think it’s worth it to spend a bit of time watching a video . Since we use electricity as means to make work, its nice to have some understanding it. There are thousands of videos online, but this one is a pearl from 1945...........really different from any tutorial on youtube, see for yourself

WATCH ME
+some more great videos in case you can't get enough
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Electricity seems to be both familiar and yet abstract. Its quite hard to imagine. In order imagine electricity, an analogy with water is often used.

Electricity is an essential ingredient of matter. Now ain't that poetic? So to picture it, lets zoom deep in and look at the smallest component of every element -

Atoms are made of even smaller particles called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are packed tightly together in the middle of the atom, and we call them the nucleus of the atom. The electrons orbit around the nucleus. Protons and electrons have electrical charges. Protons have a positive charge, and electrons have a negative charge (neutrons don't have any charge). Normally an atom has equal numbers of protons and electrons, so they cancel each other and the atom has no electrical charge.



Sometimes an electron escapes from its atom and runs off to join another atom.

Atoms with escaped electrons is positively charged and respectively, if electrons jump into atoms and become more, then the atom is negatively charged.

Free atoms can move freely (almost with the speed of light) trough metals, gases and vacuum. Or they can rest.

The surface that electrons are resting is said to have negative static electrical charge. If atoms are missing some electrons then it is said to be positive static electrical charge.

Current, Voltage, Power, Resistance

So anytime electrons move, we have current! Electrons can travel trough some materials but not trough others. The ones that allow electrons to flow are called Conductors (silver, gold, iron, copper..etc.) and the ones that do not really allow the free flow of electrons are called Insulators ( wood, plastic, rubber..etc.)

Electrical current can flow in either of two directions in a conductor. If it flows only in one direction, then it is called DC ( Directional Current). We will work with it and so the following information concerns DC.

CURRENT (I) - is the quantity of electrons passing at a given point. The unit is the AMPERE, shortly called AMP. If we compare it with water, think of it as the flow of water, the stream coming from the tap.

VOLTAGE (V or E) - is electrical pressure or force. If we now compare it with water, then Voltage is the water pressure.

The higher the pressure, the higher the flow and vice versa.

POWER (P) - is the work performed by an electrical current. It is measured in WATT. The power of a DC current is its voltage(V), times its current(I).

RESISTANCE (R) - is the conductor's (material’s) tendency to resist the current. Some materials allow more current to flow and others not. Going back to water, resistance is how much the tap is open. It is measured in OHMS (Ω).

OHM's LAW

Mr. Georg Simon Ohm, a German physicist and mathematician, discovered, that there is an interrelation between Voltage, Current and Resistance.
Thus given any two of them, one can find the third one.

V = IxR
I = V/R
R= V/I

Here is a pyramid that shows it visually.
And shows also the actuial relationship between volts, amps and ohms, which you will see way more often than V, I and R

And here another way we can see it:)