Class 7 Electronics Notes
How to read a circuit diagram
As usual, Sparkfun has a great
tutorial
on how to read a circuit diagram!
How to read a datasheet
Let’s pull up some datasheets for our various items. You’ll see the
quality varies widely. These are all parts from your Sparkfun kit.
Things you’ll often find in datasheets:
- Physical measurements of the device
- Amount of input voltage/current needed
- Amount of power it uses
- How to hook it up
- Information on how to use it in manufacturing
- Max/min temperature
- How it works inside
How to find out how to hook up something
Find the part on Sparkfun,
Adafruit, or elsewhere. Look for tutorials.
Look for comments. Search for libraries.
Example: humidity and temperature
sensor.
- Visit Sparkfun page
- Check out the datasheet.
It looks awfully complex to communicate with.
- Oh, some sample code.
Ugh.
- Some code on Github.
Looks possible.
- Let’s check out the comments
section first.
- Someone mentions an Adafruit
library. That
looks more promising.
- Oops, how to hook it up? Back to the datasheet!
- Wait, does Adafruit have any more information? Yes, they
do!. It’s not the same part,
but some guy in the comments said they were basically the same.
Let’s give it a try.