Practical Electronics for Inventors, 4th Edition

Learning Goals and Cybernetic Application

At present, I only have very basic knowledge of Electrical Engineering. My observation with the Cybernetics course narrative, there are a couple of perspectives that are completely lacking. Or rather the axiom is that everyone seems to think capitalism is some sort of evil system. I think this is a dangerous and ridiculous dialogue. More precisely, assuming everyone is on board with you on an ideology certainly defies spending time at university. This is even more exacerbated by the fact that some of us are sent from the most capitalist organisations to study here for free. And a lot of us desire to advance in the so-called capitalist organisations. What we need to acknowledge is that science and technology alone do not create innovation. If that were the case, USSR should have advanced cybernetics as a new branch of engineering. The most vibrant innovation occurred and is occurring in the capitalist regions. Now knowing this, I want to learn more about the battery, and semiconductor businesses. And my interest in renewable energy is all-time high. But my knowledge of how they work is elementary. By going through this journey of learning electrical engineering, I plan to discern what the most sustainable and sensible decisions regarding battery, semiconductor, and renewable energy are.

Supporting evidence and documentation

Electric Current is the total charge that passes through some cross-sectional area A per unit time. This cross-sectional area is most frequently a slice through a solid material, such as a conductor.

In case of the current changing over time, we define the instantnaeous current I by taking the limit as ∆t → 0, so that the current is the instantaneous rate at which charge passes through an area:

The unit of current is coulombos per second, but this unit is also called the ampere (A), named after Andrew-Marie Ampere:

Copper has one free electron per copper atom. The charge one single electron is given by:

The loss of the electron means there is one more proton per atom than electrons. The charge of a proton is:

The conductor, as a whole, is neutral. This is because there are equal numbers of electrons and protons. If a current of 1 Ampere flows through a copper wire, the number of electrons flowing by a cross section of the wire in 1 s is equal to:

So how can a negative number of electrons move? There is a funny history behind this. Benjamin Franklin, the great polymath who also pioneered electronics established a convention of assigning positive charge signs to be moving. Sometime later, a physicist by the name of Joseph Thomson proved that it is the electrons moving in the opposite direction of the conventional current I used in the equations.

However, this does not change things at all for us as engineers. This is because negative electrons going one way is equivalent to positive charges going the opposite direction. So all of us today pretend that positive charges are moving because it is convenient.

I totally did not understand the above mathematical examples so I watched the following youtube videos.

I did not quite understand the video lecture above. So this is something I will be taking time to learn. But with the uni assignments being the priority, this has not happened yet.