February 2009
Beginner
128 pages
2h 45m
English
Content preview from Getting Started with Arduino
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What Is Electricity?
If you have done any plumbing at home, electronics won't be a problem for you to understand. To understand how electricity and electric circuits work, the best way is to use something called the "water analogy". Let's take a simple device, like the battery-powered portable fan shown in Figure 4-4.
Figure 4-4. A portable fan
If you take a fan apart, you will see that it contains a small battery, a couple of wires, and an electric motor, and that one of the wires going to the motor is interrupted by a switch. If you have a fresh battery in it and turn the switch on, the motor will start to spin, providing the necessary chill. How does this work? Well, imagine that the battery is both a water reservoir and a pump, the switch is a tap, and the motor is one of those wheels that you see in watermills. When you open the tap, water flows from the pump and pushes the wheel into motion.
In this simple hydraulic system, shown in Figure 4-5, two factors are important: the pressure of the water (this is determined by the power of pump) and the amount of water that will flow in the pipes (this depends on the size of the pipes and the resistance that the wheel will provide to the stream of water hitting it).
Figure 4-5. A hydraulic system
You'll quickly realise that if you want the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.