32 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
32 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
# Photoresistors
|
|
|
|
This is another analog to digital converter project using a photoresistor like I used a potentiometer in the last project.
|
|
|
|
# Lessons Learned
|
|
|
|
- Resistors in a circuit don't work the way I thought they did
|
|
|
|
# Resistors
|
|
|
|
I always thought resistors worked much like a hose reducer. Say you have a 2" hose with a 1 gallon per minute of water flowing through it. Now you reduce that hose to 1" with a 2" to 1" adapter. The orifice is physically 50% smaller so now you can only fit 50% as much matter through it in a given period of time. Electronics tutorials often use streams of water as an analogy for electrical current, and this makes easy sense.
|
|
|
|
So when I looked at the circuit diagram, I wondered, "why are we measuring the voltage on te circuit UPSTREAM from the photoresistor?" Wouldn't it stand to reason that you would witness the impact of the resistor *downstream* of the resistor? For example it doesn't make sense to measure the impact of a `2" -> 1"` hose reducer on the `2"` side, right?
|
|
|
|
The answer is because, as it turns out, if you take the measurement downstream of the photoresistor in this particular example, you will always read 0v. You will never see a change in the output voltage from the photoresistor. In order to see the impact of the photoresistor in the circuit, you need to measure upstream of the photoresistor.
|
|
|
|
<center>
|
|
<img alt="wot" width="320" src="wot.jpeg"/>
|
|
|
|
<br/>
|
|
<i>The face of a man who realizes he has failed to grasp something fundamental</i>
|
|
<br/>
|
|
</center>
|
|
|
|
If you remember back to [tutorial 4 with Analog Digital Conversion](../04-adc/README.md#measuring-potentiometers), I talked about potentiometers, and how they are a `voltage divider`.
|
|
|
|
> Potentiometers are adjustable resistors (just like a rheostat), but with 3 pins, they're acting as two resistors in series like a voltage divider.
|
|
|
|
I used the term voltage divider there not because I actually understood what it was doing, but because that was part of the terminology used in the material I used to better understand potentiometers. And while I understand the moving the wiper changed the resistance on the output tap, and I understood that this could be described as a voltage divider, I didn't really understand what a voltage divider was, what it does, and why it does it.
|
|
|
|
A voltage divider does exactly what it says: it creates a point in the circuit at which the available voltage is equal to some portion of the input voltage, produced by dividing the input voltage across a couple of points of resistance.
|