General #
- Lightning is just the discharge of static electricity as the bottoms of clouds accumulate more electrons than the top
- If a substance has a really high resistance it is effectively an insulator
- The thicker the wire, the lower resistance it has, and the longer the wire, the more resistance it has
- A circuit ground is literally connected to the earth, where a common is the negative pole. The Earth then can act as a conductor between parts of the circuit (since it is really big)
Relays #
- In relays, incoming currents power an electromagnet which pulls down a small piece of metal to allow outgoing current. It is just a switch turned on and off by current.
Transistors #
- Transistors are basically relays but smaller and consume much less power. They replaced relays as the building blocks of computers
Oscillator #
- A circuit which oscillates back and forth in value
- An inverter wired to itself - the output oscillates between on and off (since the gate takes a short period of time for the signal to switch)
- This is feedback
- All computers have some sort of oscillator to make everything run in sync
- Clock cycles
Flip-Flop #
- When feedback is used in a circuit to build a circuit with multiple stable states it is called a flip-flop
- The current stable state depends on the previous stable state, thus the circuit “remembers”
- For example, the circuit may hold the last value no matter the circuit inputs until a reset switch is flipped
- This “reset” can be a bit indicating writing to memory
IC’s #
- Integrated chips
- LOW mostly corresponds to a 0 input, HIGH to a 1 input
- Since voltages arent’ exactly 0 and 1, it is broken down into LOW and HIGH so like .2 volts can be considered a LOW