Electrical Fundamentals is essentially an academic skills class whose overt purpose is to develop some very basic analysis skills along with some limited awareness of electronic test equipment. Over the years all schools have realized that with electronics technology exploding in the marketplace it is important for every science and engineering student to have some practical skills along with the academic ones. For some students this electronic stuff is pretty familiar and for others it is not at all so. Because of this we will begin by just doing some basic identification of devices and tracing of electronics objects.

Purpose:

For the student to gain some experience identifying and working with electronic components. All of your observations and thoughts will be captured in your notebook See the notebook lab if you're not sure what the expectations are.

Procedure:

• You will be handed some sort of electronic equipment, possibly a power supply from a PC.
• The first step is to look at the different sorts of electronic devices in this device and develop some confidence at identifying their critical features. This is much like learning to distinguish trees from shrubs, conifers from deciduous trees, and plants from trees. The following is an incomplete list of devices I would like to be sure you can indentify with some confidence and some potential questions about each. Some of these will be familiar from ENGR 201 and some are specific to ENGR 202.

  • Resistors
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • why are some "fatter" than others?
    • how are they labeled?
  • Capacitors
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • why are some taller or larger diameter than others?
    • are they always round?
    • how are they labeled?
  • Inductors
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • what do the variations in their size and shape indicate?
    • what are they wrapped around and why?
    • how are they labeled?
  • heat sinks
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • what is their purpose?
  • transistors
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • why are some attached to heat sinks and some not?
    • how are they labeled?
  • IC devices
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • what do the variations in their size and shape indicate?
    • how are they labeled?
  • transformers
    • what are their physical characteristics?
    • what do the variations in their size and number of pins indicate?
    • how are they labeled?
  • other beasts you wondered about?

• Provide the following decoding of various devices.
  • Resistors
    • find one and read the color code and determine it's resistance.
    • is this what you get when you measure it with a DMM?
  • Capacitors
    • find one with a printed label and tell me what the numbers mean.
  • Inductors
    • is there anyway to decode these?
  • transistors
    • find the data sheet (online) for one of the power transistors attached to a heat sink.
    • what does the data sheet say the transistor is designed for?
  • IC devices
    • find the data sheet (online) for one of the IC devices.
    • what does the data sheet say the IC is designed for?
  • transformers
    • find the data sheet (online) for one of the transformers.
    • what does the data sheet say the transformer is designed for?

   

• You will be provided with a number of schematics of your circuit board (hopefully more than one). FInd some portion of the physical circuit that you can connect with the schematic representation. Draw, in your notebook, the physical implementation of the circuit showing the physical organization and the interconnections using wires and traces on the pc board. Be sure your drawing includes 8-10 devices of different kinds and clarifies the point I am trying to make (which you should understand by this time:)
• Here's a link to a description of the standards of a good schematic drawing from a standard electrical engineering text call Horowitz and Hill. Which of the schematics I provided you best meet this standard? How easy did you find them to use?
• Go home and relax:) At some point write a short reflection (in your notebook) on what you discovered. Lab notebooks will be picked up on the first day of class next week.