General
This section will tell you how not to fry your components.
How does voltage work?
There are 2 main components of electricity. These are voltage and amperage (stroom en stroomsterkte), components work on a specified voltage, the amperage won’t actually change anything. This is because we can look at it like a person, if we need 5 apples for a person every day then if we feed him 10, he will explode. But, if we give him 5 apples every day and have another 5 in a bag, he won’t eat the other 5 cause he is only getting the 5 he needs. So we can see that 5V, 2A is fine to give the man, but 10V, 1A will make him explode. So knowing this, we know that if a component has the voltage specification: 5V at 1A, which 2 of these 4 answers will be correct to give the component so that it works correctly?
- 5V at 3A
- 9V at 1A
- 5V at 1A
- 5V at 0,5A
The correct answer:
1 and 3
2 is over volting
4 is under amping (which won’t kill the component but it won’t work correctly)
What happens if we need to power more than 1 component? Here we don’t need some special thing luckily. It’s as easy as using at least the amount of amps you need for both components together, so if 2 components have 5V at 1A required then we use 5V at 2A at least.
Danger
Important to note is that if we power 2 components from 1 battery, BOTH components need to be able to handle the voltage of the battery or power supply seperately.
How to find voltage requirements?
An important question is how do you actually find a voltage requirement, here there is a simple answer which is useful for anything in this course and CS in general: Google!! If we want to find the voltage requirement for the component ‘Relais Module OT951-C101’, we do this by doing name + documentation OR name + voltage requirement OR check the component if it has any visible markings for which voltage it needs.