Basic components - eclubiitk/EClub-Handbook GitHub Wiki

LEDs are quite often used in circuits both for debugging and for outputs as well. Theses contains two leads which are for positive and negative terminal respectively, where the one which is longer in size than the other is connected to the positive terminal while the one which is shorter is connected to the negative terminal of a battery or a circuit.

Capacitors are simple passive device that can store an electrical charge on their plates when connected to a voltage source. Capacitors can also be used to filter the noise which is like filtering the ac part froma dc source.
There exits many types of capacitors and one of them is cermaic capacitor (Fig 3.).

This types of capacitors have special coding codes which helps in determining the capacitance of the capacitor. Below is the table of representing Letter code and its corresponding capacitance(Table 1.).

You can cick here to know more about these coding.

The principal job of a resistor within an electrical or electronic circuit is to “resist” (hence the name Resistor), regulate or to set the flow of electrons (current) through them by using the type of conductive material from which they are composed. Resistors can also be connected together in various series and parallel combinations to form resistor networks which can act as voltage droppers, voltage dividers or current limiters within a circuit. Resistors are also called “Passive Devices”, that is they contain no source of power or amplification but only attenuate or reduce the voltage or current signal passing through them. This attenuation results in electrical energy being lost in the form of heat as the resistor resists the flow of electrons through it.
Unlike capacitors resistors don't have letter codes but have color code.Below is the figure(Fig 5.) which explains each color and the table(Table 2.) which consists of color and its corresponding code to calulate the resistance.

You can cick here to know more about these coding and calculating it. Alternatively you can click here to directly know the resistance of a resistor woth its matching color value

Wires the building blocks of a circuit and are used to connect any component to another. There exists many types of wires but the two basic types are:

• **Normal Wires**




• Jumper Wires

These are typically of three types:

• Male to Male



• Male to Female



• Female to Female

The potentiometer, commonly referred to as a “pot”, is a three-terminal mechanically operated rotary analogue device which can be found and used in a large variety of electrical and electronic circuits. They are passive devices, meaning they do not require a power supply or additional circuitry in order to perform their basic linear or rotary position function.

An IC is a collection of electronic components -- resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc. -- all stuffed into a tiny chip, and connected together to achieve a common goal. They come in all sorts of flavors: single-circuit logic gates, op amps, 555 timers, voltage regulators, motor controllers, microcontrollers, microprocessors, FPGAs...the list just goes on-and-on.