Beginner Electronics

Beginner Electronics – 6 – LED’s

what's going on everyone my name is Gautam Ward welcome back to electronics episode 6 in this episode we are going to learn about a very important

electronic component and that is the LED LED stands for light emitting diode now that sounds complicated but LEDs are really just tiny little light bulbs LEDs are really efficient they usually last

for quite a while they come in all shapes and sizes and they also come in a ton of different colors the ones on the screen are one of the most common forms of LEDs you can get these types in

almost any color and these are the ones that I am going to be using throughout this tutorial series but like I said there are different types of LEDs of different sizes and shapes and all of

that so an LED light emitting diode is basically just a tiny little light bulb and we are going to be using LEDs a ton in almost every single one of the projects that we create throughout this

tutorial series that means it's really important to have a good supply of LEDs in your possession and they're fairly cheap too now while LEDs are just simple little light bulbs for the most part

there are some really important things that we need to know about them before we can actually use them first of all an LED can't just be hooked up to a circuit for two main reasons

the first reason is that LEDs usually require a resistor to be in the circuit along with them because LEDs can't handle the amount of current from say a 9-volt battery so if you wish to run an

LED off of a 9-volt battery it might work for a little bit but then your LED is going to burn out in no longer work because there's too much current flowing from a 9-volt battery through the LED

now this isn't always the case but most likely it will be so we know that an LED in order to have it run off of a bigger power source needs to have a resistor on it now we are going to talk about in the

next video how to choose a proper resistor value but let's not worry about resistance for right now say we could just hook up an led to a circuit well we have another problem an LED light

emitting diode is a diode now we are going to talk about diodes in the future don't worry about them but what that means is an LED must be hooked up in a circuit in a specific way or else it

won't work and you could damage the LED first off let's take a look at the two metal leads coming off of this LED as you can see there is a longer lead and a shorter

the longer lead is called the anode and the shorter lead is called the cathode so the longer lead the anode should be hooked up to a positive voltage source so the positive terminal of our battery

while the cathode or the shorter lead should be hooked up to the negative terminal of our battery and it must be hooked up in that way if you connect the longer lead or the anode to the negative

terminal of the battery and the cathode to the positive terminal of a battery then your circuit will not work and you could damage the LED now what if you have an LED that has both of its metal

legs the same length well we can't tell which one is the anode and which one is the cathode well some LEDs have a little flat spot just above the cathode lead and that'll indicate the cathode or

which leg should be hooked up to the negative terminal of your circuit so that's another way you can tell but most often LEDs like this will have two different sized metal legs a longer one

for the positive or anode and the shorter one for the cathode or the negative terminal those are two very important words that you should get in your head a node basically means

positive cathode basically means negative so great now we know what an LED is a light-emitting diode basically it's a little light bulb we are going to be using them a lot so make sure you

have a good amount of them in your possession I recommend at least twenty to thirty of them you might burn a few out and we are going to be using them quite a bit

except I mentioned at the beginning of the video that an LED in order to hook it up to say a 9-volt battery we need a resistor but how many ohms of resistance do we need do we need 200

ohms do we need 1000 ohms well we're gonna find out how to calculate that in the next video hopefully you guys understood that LEDs are very important if you have any questions whatsoever

leave them down below in the comments and I or someone else will hopefully answer or help you with your problem thanks for watching everyone and I'll see you guys in the next video

We learn about LED’s and how they work!

See my website: https://codenmore.github.io/
Follow me on Twitter – @CodeNMore – http://www.twitter.com/CodeNMore
Comment, PM, or Tweet me for help!

Teaching to understand all subjects to the fullest extent!