What's going on everyone? My name is Codamore and welcome back to Electronics episode 12. In this episode we are going to be talking about the basics of schematics and why schematics are so important. Now I know that this series has been pretty boring so far, but we have to get through all this boring and necessary stuff before we go on to making some really awesome circuits. And part of making some awesome circuits is knowing how to create and read schematics.
Now, what in the world is a schematic? Well, a schematic is basically a representation or a diagram of a circuit that you want to build. For instance, if you were building a house, you would have a blueprint of how to make that house.
Well, a schematic is basically a blueprint of a circuit that we want to make. And schematics are made up of many different symbols that we're going to learn throughout this entire series, but we have to know the basic symbols and how schematics are actually put together first, and that's what we're going to talk about today. So, here you can see a very basic schematic. This is actually the schematic of the circuit that we built just a couple of videos ago where we made an LED light up.
Now it looks really confusing right now, but you're going to get the hang of this in no time, I promise. So let's try and figure out what this does. We know that this is going to light up an LED because I just told you that's what it does. So what could all these symbols represent? Well, let's start with the simplest thing.
These white lines right here, they probably would represent wires. These white lines that are straight and going up and down are connecting components together. And that's exactly what they are.
They're just wires or a way of connecting two components together. So that's simple enough. Now we know that our circuit had a battery. It had a power supply. So where is that on our circuit?
Well this symbol right here is a pretty universal schematic symbol for a DC power source. A direct current power source like a battery. And you'll notice that it has a long line here and a short line here and those represent the different terminals of a battery so say.
For instance, this long one here generally means the positive terminal, while the shorter one means the negative terminal, usually. So it tells us how we can create our circuit and what needs to be connected to what terminal of the battery. So if you were ever working with an alternating current circuit that takes an alternating current instead of a battery, remember we talked about this in one of the first videos of the series, that schematic symbol would look a little bit like this.
It would be a circle with a wave. Inside of it that would represent an alternating current power source, but anyways, let's get back on to this schematic right here So if we follow from the positive terminal of our battery down this wire right here We encounter this component right here now This squiggly line represents a resistor and usually on schematics these resistors will either be labeled with a value or some type of name That way you can know the proper value of the resistor. For instance. This might be a 300 Ohm resistor So that's a very important symbol to remember of course. It's just a bunch of squiggly lines and that represents a resistor.
So if we have our battery and we have a resistor, then that means that this must be our LED component. And it is. It's basically a triangle with a line at the end here and then two arrows pointing up from it.
That is the schematic symbol for an LED, a light emitting diode. And then we just have a wire connecting that all the way back to the negative terminal of our battery. And that is it.
That's the schematic of the circuit that we built just a few videos ago. Now let me go just a tiny bit more in depth on some really important things that we need to know. So I already talked about the positive and negative terminals of the battery and the value of a resistor.
So let's head on to this LED down here. The part before the triangle here, this is the anode, if I can write that, this is the anode of the LED, or basically what you would usually connect to a more positive power source. While the part after the line of the LED is the cathode, or the shorter leg of the LED. So that's something that's very useful to know. That way you're not telling someone who's building this circuit to hook up the LED backwards.
Now let's talk about one final very, very important part of schematics. How wires are shown on schematics. It looks simple enough here, we just have wires connecting components together, but schematics can get really, really big and they can have many wires being shown.
So for instance, let's say we have a wire like that. And then we have another wire in our schematic that's shown going over it like that. There is no connection here.
There is absolutely no connection between these two wires. They are two completely separate wires. They're not connected in any way, it's just to save space on the schematic, they have to overlap them like that. The same goes for, if you see, this on a schematic. There is no connection whatsoever between these wires.
And I kind of like this version better because it shows like the wire is going over this wire and there's no connection at all. However, what if you need to connect two wires together? Well that's going to look something like this with a giant dot in the intersection. These two wires right here are connected together.
They are joined that way they are basically part of one another they're connected. So that's just something really important to note. So we know the very basic schematic symbols of what we've already learned this far.
We know our DC power source, our resistor here, and then an LED. And throughout this entire series, as we learn about more and more electronics components, I'll be teaching you the different schematic symbols that are used for them. But anyways, that's the basic of schematics. Let's try and get into a little bit more exciting stuff throughout this series.
Thanks for watching, everyone, and I'll see you guys in the next video.