Lab 1 – Basic Electronics – Creative Technology and Design

Part 1: LED’s in Series and Parallel

The first part of lab was to build out two different circuits and both circuits incorporate a switch. Each circuit is built with two LED’s and a voltage regulator that will let the power going through the current be 5V.

The first circuit I built to start off was a simple LED with no switch in order to get an idea of how to start off the lab. It had one resister and two red LED’s.

Then I continued with adding a switch to my circuit to complete the series. The fallowing diagram shows my series circuit and its labeled with both voltage and resistor power.

As you can see in the schematic I calculated the resistor base on what kind of LED I had and the amount of volts in the current. I had two red LED’s which both have 2V forward voltage, which according to my calculation should result in needing to use a 50 ohm resistor to complete the circuit. I used a power regulator in my circuit in order to take the 9V input and convert it into 5V so it would overload the power going to the LED’s.

As you can see the two lights lid up which means that my circuit was complete and my calculation was correct. The electric current flows through the wires set up in the way that is drawn out in the schematic leading to the lights to light up in the end.

The next circuit I made was the parallel circuit where I have two LED’s in the same power circle but if one of them stops working the other continues to work, unlike in a series circuit. For this circuit I calculated that with an input of 5V and current having to go through two different LED’s I would need to use a resister of 75 ohms for each light.

As you can see my circuit worked and each light turned on and were wired according to my schematic. When I unplugged on the other light would stay on because they are not depended on each other, each one gets its own flow of current.

Part 2: DIY Switch

For the second part we had to make our own switch using whatever we liked. I ended up using two pieces of copper tape to make a press together kind of switch, when you press the two copper pieces together it makes the lights switch on. I continued to use my circuit in a parallel because I wanted to make sure that in the future if one LED didn’t work it wouldn’t stop my project from working completely.

After connecting the new switch into the circuit I tested it out by pressing the two pieces of copper tape together and the two LED’s turned on. When the copper pieces don’t touch at all they break the electrical current of the circuit, so when you touch the pieces together it creates a closed circuit and the lights turn on.

Part 3: Creative Enclosure

For the last part of the lab we had to make a creative enclosure for our DIY switch and because I had a switch you had to press together I had to think of a creative way to use it. I noticed a lot of other people making similar enclosures so I thought of making something completely different but simple. I decided to make a happy box, that went along with the song “If your happy and you know it”, it might be simple but it did make me happy when I saw the lights turn on when the two hands clapped together.