While working on an Electricity/Electronics exhibit for the Museum of Science in Boston I discovered a number of serious problems in attempting to explain simple electricity. One problem was the obscure way that exhibit devices typically present electrical effects: by using meters. Sophisticated skills a
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re required to interpret meter readings and to imagine the invisible events they imply. Exhibit designers who are familiar with electronics sometimes fall into the trap believing that the general public also has their skills. And so designers include all sorts of digital and needle-meters as part of a display. But an electronics specialist sees a meter needle in quite a different way than does the unskilled public. Meter readings usually serve more to obscure and complex-ify the exhibit than to reveal and enlighten. Think about it: if an exhibit makes you feel stupid, will you end up LIKING science No. The opposite occurs. A second problem: nearly all of the electricity explanations I found in children`s science textbooks were wrong, so I couldn`t use textbooks as a guide for explaining electricity at a simple level. Go here for more about this. And third, as an electrical engineer I had a gut-level feel for the math behind electronics, yet my entire non-math picture of electricity was mostly based on the incorrect explanations found in K-6 textbooks. As a designer, I`d been living in a world of electronics math, never realizing that my verbal and visual explanations for electrical phenomena were totally incompatible with the mathematical description. My verbal and visual explanations were WRONG. But as long as I stuck with engineering, used design equations and CAD software, I was fine, but if I tried to use any non-math...
This project fits more for custom made battery casing that can have more space to hide things inside. This switch with few alterations can be used for any other project as well but is designed based on e-bike needs! This project use a clever functionality of....
The circuit described here uses ultrasonic oscillations and operates based on the propagation velocity of these oscillations in the air. Thus, we can easily determine the distance of two points if the time within which the wave travels this distance is....
Sometimes the precious metals are hidden too deep and are not detected except with complicated devices. In many cases, however, small pieces of precious metal buried near the surface can be detected by relatively simple means. Everyone is very attractive to....
Many times for various reasons we forget or can not water the plants that we have in our homes. And many humidity sensors units just notify us with a beeping sound or with a flashing light, that the pot needs watering. But what if we are away from home? This....
The principle behind a metal detector is really very simple. Proof of this is the circuit that follows, in which it proves that the construction of a metal detector can be done in the minute, with few components that we find very easily everywhere. With the....
The sub-harmonic bass generator is a sound producing unit for guitars. The sound it produces looks very much like that of the bass guitar. The octave generator is sometimes quite unusual since it does not produce any of the usual ways of coloring the sound,....
In the past the sounding (sea bottom measurement) was done with the "bullet", that is, with a heavy lead object that the seamen plucked into the sea hung from a calibrated rope. As soon as the "bullet" reached the bottom, the depth appeared directly from the....
This Amplifier was designed to have the following specifications: Distortion less than 0.1% at full power of 100W even at 20KHz. Power has to be attributed to an extended bandwidth. The output transistors must be protected against short circuits. The power....
A series of LEDs serve to alert the gardener when plants need water. Using two conventional digital integrated LEDs and a series of LEDs, we make a very useful device for gardening. The device detects the amount of water in the pot and alerts the grower.....
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