How electricity and electronics works

The basics of electricity and electronics

In this instructable rather than give you a set of instructions you can follow to make something I am going to try to give you an introduction to basic electricity and how transistors work so you can understand some of the things you might try to do.

Step 1

To understand electricity and electronics we have to start at the atomic level of matter. We all know that things are made up of atoms and recognise the planetary model of an atom with the nucleus (red protons and green neutrons ) surrounded by orbiting electrons (blue). Although this is just a visual model it will serve well for understanding electricity.

Comments

[rickharris]

The electrons are moving right to left - negative to positive as the "repel" arrow shows. Electrons are negatively charged.

A battery is just a LARGE chemical source of electrons, so as the electrons are repelled they are replaced with more electrons from the battery. At the positive end they fill up the electron orbits where there is a shortage of electrons in this model.

[luvit]

dang. there's 10 steps to electricity? i really underestimated this ):

[rickharris]

As a starting point -yes - When I trained as an electronics engineer my instructor said at the start " Electronics is easy - there are only 5 things to bother about: Resistors, Capacitors, Inductors (coils) and some kind of active device (transistor, IC etc.) and of you want to include it the wires or PCB that joins them together. The rest is all about how you combine these 5 things!"

[jma123]

what about when it is hit by lightning ?

[rickharris]

Lightning is just a large accumulation of electrons in the atmosphere - so still the same -

[Lecrae is the best!]

Here it looks like negative is repelling positive.
Am I missing something, or could you explain a little more?

[Lecrae is the best!]

(on step 4, to be exact)

[rickharris]

Thanks for pointing out the typo - Corrected now.

[seanroberts]

"N type material, N type material and another N type material" Should be: N type material, P type material and another N type material