[Music] [Applause] Hey here to learn something new well to keep those knowledge gears greased remember to subscribe and hit the notification button to get notified when a pop and fresh video is ready for your consumption if you want to be a tinkerer here's something you should probably know about breadboards now you may want a vision breadboards is a thick piece of wooden board for which to cut bread upon and that would be absolutely correct early electronics enthusiasts would use these kitchen tools as a platform for building electronics they would either use nails or thumbtacks to run wires to different electronic components then throughout the 1900s bread boards continued to evolve until the 1970s where we got rid of the cutting board and went to a current breadboard form factor that we have today so as I briefly mentioned the purpose of bread boards is to help in creating circuits they come in all different shapes and sizes for larger and smaller circuit testing the most commonly used bread boards look like this is known as a solderless breadboard because it doesn't require any solder to connect components together so how does this piece of plastic full of holes help create circuits let's take a closer look starting from the outside and working in most bread boards have two rows of holes that run the entire length of the board with a colored stripe along either side of them these are for the power rails that power the breadboard there's one for a positive and one for a negative current each denoted by a plus sign and red color for positive and a negative sign and blue or black color for negative if we take the back off of the breadboard we can see that the two rows each have a single metal strip that connects all the positive holes and one that connects all the negative holes that means that no matter which hole you plug into along the board it will be connected to the corresponding current be aware though that some red boards have a break in the middle of the rows to allow for different types of currents this means that these rows will not be connected to these rows in order to supply power to the rails 22 and 23 gauge wires are commonly used because they fit nicely in the holes as far as the power supply it goes most common bread boards are rated for 5 to 15 volts at 1 amp or less but be sure to check your breadboard specifications to be sure that means don't go plugging a wall outlet into your breadboard because you could do some serious damage to the board and yourself starting off household batteries are a good choice because they have low amperage and it's easy to find cases that will connect them to the bread boards these inter sets of holes are called terminal strips while the power rails one the length of the board the terminal strips are perpendicular to the power rails each column of holes is separated from the next column again taking off the back of the breadboard you can see how the metal strips connect each column of holes so while these holes are connected to each other these holes are not you'll also notice this big split in the board separating it into two equal sides this is known as a dip support ravine dip stands for dual inline package which is a description for a chip like this that has parallel pins on each side of it the breadboard is designed so that you can insert the chip with its pins on each side of the dip support ravine so this is a dip chip on a breadboard while this is a dip and chip on a breadboard well alrighty then let's test it out as a simple example let's do an LED switch where we have a 9-volt battery with a wire connector a 470 ohm resistor an LED a spare piece of wire and a button switch start by plugging in your power source into the power rails with the ground going to the negative rail and the positive go into the positive rail since mine has para rails on both sides I'm gonna have the ground and positive going to separate sides of the board let's add the button to the breadboard and just have it sitting across the ravine to make sure the positive and negative legs are completely separated using the piece of wire we can plug it into any hole that's connected to our positive power source plug the other end of the wire and one of the columns that a button leg is connected to on the other side of the button we can connect our resistor to the same column as one of these button legs and connect the other end of the resistor to an empty column that's on this half of the breadboard next we can connect the positive leg of the LED to this resistor row and the negative side to the ground power source how do you know which leg of the LED is positive and which one is negative the shorter one is negative and the longer one is positive now the LED should also have a side that is more flat than the other side so this also denotes the ground side I remember it by saying that the side of the LED that has been ground down is the ground side with everything connected press the button and see if it lights up and now you can do a little dance because you just created your first breadboard circuit now you can check breadboards off your list of tinkering skills that's it for this chapter of the field guide that's one more tinkering tool to add to your toolbox want to suggest a guide head on over to tinkernut.com slash ideas to submit your idea if you want more tinkering videos you can click here or please be kind enough to like subscribe or comment if you made it this far here's your reward the idea for the first fax machine was invented before the first telephone and the first lighter was invented before the first match