Today Oscar introduced us to capacitors. Capacitors accumulate current and express it as voltage. We calculate it using this formula:
A sample capacitor is shown below:
Since our circuit contains a resistor, the capacitor will charge until there is a 0 voltage difference between the ends of the resistor. The capacitor charges faster when there is a greater voltage difference. If we graph the voltage over time, we see the voltage starts high, but approaches 0 and stabilizes.
As you can see here, in a more detailed version of our circuit shown above, the amount of current flowing clockwise becomes smaller.
We then tried working with capacitors on our breadboards, and worked with this circuit:
Oscar gave us a pictorial version as well, which looks like this:
By adding a capacitor to our circuit, we made an oscillator!
We added a speaker (the cylindrical cone with the big G) so that when we manipulated the potentiometer, a different pitch came from the speaker. The end of class was a lot of fun when we all had speakers going at various high, annoying pitches!
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