2/25 Circuit Analysis and Breadboards

We are introduced to the idea of branches, nodes, and loops and were asked to identify how many of each were in the given circuit.

We are given a circuit analysis problem and asked to find the multiple ways the problem can be solved, because there are 3 currents and the first current must be positive, we have 4 total possibilities. We found the current for each of the 4 combinations.

We are given another circuit analysis problem where we have a circuit and we are asked what will happen to two light bulbs in the middle of the circuit once the switch closed. Because the voltage potential difference at the points above and below each light bulb was always 1V, we found that the light bulb did not get brighter or dimmer.

We did a lab with the breadboards again except this time we used a special device that allowed us to control the voltage that we send through the breadboard.

We manually adjusted the voltage from 0 to 2 with .2 increments for the voltage so that we could test for the current going through the circuit as well. We also read the voltage with a multi-meter to see what the experimental voltage is. We found the resistance going through our advertised 100 ohm resistor to have an actual resistance of 98.3 ohms from the data collected. 

We graphed the data we produced from our lab and plotted it on a graph. Once we plotted it, we found the relationship between current and voltage to be linear and our r-squared value to be greater than .98 (which in statistic terms indicates that it fits a linear curve very closely). 

We are given power, voltage, and resistance and are asked to find when the resistance is cold (when voltage is initially applied) vs when the resistance is hot (when the circuit has been running for a while). We found that the resistance of the resistor to be 192 ohms in the beginning and less than 192 ohms after.

We do another lab with the breadboards except this time we introduce something called  MOSFET to the circuit. The purpose of the MOSFET is to keep the voltage at a consistent level. The voltage is drained and applied to the circuit to maintain consistency. We found that the current this time around produced a graph much closer to a linear relationship due to the increased consistency provided by the MOSFET.

We set up another lab with the breadboards and multimeter to measure more data except this time we are using a MOSFET.

This is a graph of the along with the table of the data we collected from the lab with the MOSFET.