Hello all. I am wondering if there is any resources or ways I can learn more about how electricity works.
I’ve always struggled at understanding electricity but I would love to actually learn to understand it and how to properly use electrical diagnosing equipment such as a powerprobe and multi meter, and understand the basics of how electricity works and to safely “fuck around and find out”
Tech school x1000 - most have post grad programs that meet at night if you’re just interested in building skills. Some colleges even have side classes you can take for that. I took my Welding courses with Wentworth in Boston and they were held at the tin knockers union so it would be a similar scenario to that. Highly recommended with the college courses - more side courses that require no additional course load and usually end up with you certified to show your skills. I need to re-up my certs but they left me certified in stick/mig in several positions
MIT has a lot of free courses online. Here is one:
Well, the two main concepts would be “electrical circuit” and the “ohm’s law”(I=U/R and every possible combination of those). From my experience (almost) everything else is just variation of these subjects.
Also we use different types of electrical current according to how it behaves troughout time.
So the components of the law are;
U: Electromotive force aka voltage [Volts] , which exists everywhere where is difference in electric potential (on the same circuit), which is the build-up of electric particles and their electrostatic ( Coulomb ) force.
Pressure is good analouge in water plumbing.
I: Electric current [Ampere] , defined as amount of electrons or charged particles passing trough a wire or anything, per second.
Water flow or water current would here do, so an Ampere meter on your multimeter is nice analogue to water consuption meter on your house.
R: Resistance [Ohm] , this is best pictured as a “friction” to the flow (I), but only as the concept, not as the principle. This can have a lot of different scenarios as every component in electic circuit has it, it is also designed as the “load”, which can be heater or led panel or motor or speaker… In the case of alternating current (AC) , if the load is inductive or capacitive ( spoiler it almost always is even by " parasitic" amount) this becomes inductive resistance and capacitive resistance, togedther called Impedance (Z)[Ohms].
The most basic example is the simplest circuit, and we can use it to break down the ohms law.
Battery that is connected via conducting wires to the light bulb.
-Battery ( Let’s say this one is 12Volts like the car ones. That will be a source of constant current or “DC” or “⎓”, cuz it wont change troughout time)
-Light bulb ( I think this one is the black body radiation spectrum and how emited light is changing in relation to body’s temperature, so here the el. current actualy heats up the bulbs internal wolfram wire to high temp due to wire’s high resistance and this “friction” becomes heat loss, calculated as Power=Current^2*Resistance. The concequence of this is light radiation of black (wolfram) body. Lets say our bulb has resistance of 100 Ohms.
-Wires: 
They should have as low resistance as possible so they dont produce those heat losses from above, and deliver all the powa to our “load” in this case the bulb.
To calculate the current flowing trough our circuit we use the law I=U( 12 Volts from our battery ) \ R( 100 Ohms from our bulb) and we get 0.12A or 120mA. Now as this is DC if you were to touch this circuit nothing would happen. BUT if this 120mA were AC, from you outlet maybe, you’d have nice 85% chance to end up dead…
Power in Watts[W] can be calculated as VoltageCurrent, or Voltage^2/Resistance or Current^2Resistance.
If you were to measure this circuit with your multimeter, you could do next things:
-DC Voltage measure on battery, black on black red on red to get 12ish volts.
-DC Current measure, for this you need to replace one of the wires with your multimeter so that the current flows trough it, to get 120mA.
-Resistance measure on the bulb, make sure there is no current when measuring resistance, connect the two probes from multimeter to two ends of the bulb to get 100 Ohm.
Be aware of the multimeter maximum values rating!!!
Take note that multimeter has more ranges for single unit and not all connections on multimeter can measure all units.
If you measure AC units on DC setting you can fry your multimeter, vice versa you can get AC component of DC unit.
Take care, don’t mess with high voltage or outlet voltage as any AC voltage over 50Volts is high risk. US outlets are 110V and others are 230V.
The best way to learn is to start tinkering around with some low voltage stuff, inevitably you will solder some breadboard up to find it doesn’t quite work. At that point you will have to start doing simple diagnostics to what you have made. when you start simple your mistakes might be simple as well, something as simple as a backwards diode and the circuit won’t work as expected.
I would start with buying a few small tools such as your multi meter, soldering iron, wire strippers, and a small dc power supply. these don’t have to be super expensive.
there are books out there that start from a beginners prospective out there like this:
next you might buy a kit that allows you to do a few projects, and get the feel of how components are assembled. Like I mentioned earlier I’d suggest you not spend too much on kits. Often times if you have a book detailing the components you’ll need for a build you can just skip the expensive kits and order the components directly from Digikey.com or Mouser.com
so in a nut shell, start simple and learn to correct simple things. after you build your skill you can peruse more advanced projects. right off the bat I would avoid working with rasberry pi or arduino. keep it simple for now
I agree with De_Neil. Start with (safe) tinkering, and watch some youtube stuff like Khan Academy for the very most basics.
Then you can take a class as others have suggested, and you’ll be starting out on a good footing.
If you get the opportunity, PLC / VFD knowledge is very useful down the line as well, but you’ll need the basics first.
Electrickery…wiggled or unwiggled…usually taught unwiggled first
Have a project where you accomplish a goal (my first big project was activating a solenoid using an IR sensor) using YouTube for components and subsystems as needed. @De_Neil gives good advice and a good book; low voltage stuff and basic tools.
Internet assisted tinkering.
If you want a book, I’d recommend practical electronics for inventors. Really good detail about components; I use text books as reference material after learning a topic.
Electroboom on youtube does a great job of explaining the fundamentals while keeping it funny/interesting and showing you what NOT to do. I struggled understanding the fundamentals of wiggly electricity, but he does a great job of explaining AC as well as 3ph concepts.
Hey,
So did you order any stuff, got a particular project in mind?
I love all these smart guy responses. Lol toys and all!
If you want to learn about electrical its as easy as going down to your local ibew hall and signing up!
Home depot has beginner home owner books to start with, easy read, or a electrical for dummies, then move on to more complex reads, home depot book covered all the badics
There’s been some great responses. In the same vain what would you recommend for starting to learn plcs for growing purposes? Would raspberry pi with home assistant would be best to start tinkering? I just don’t really anything besides it and have no clue where to start. Especially nowadays when most of pages trying to sell you products instead of general knowledge. Thank you everyone
Oh dude, don’t get me started on RPI projects! I need to get a new one, myself because I sent the last one out to a friend that really could have used a computer to bring around with him when he needed it so I stuffed it full of pretty much any video game you can think of and sent him out an xbox controller to go with it. Works fucking PERFECT. Those things are swiss army knives. I’ve personally made several projects with the ones I had, first one being an automatic plant watering system - I put some pictures of it in this thread
I think further down I’ve got the guts of a project that I didn’t start yet but have (almost) all the parts for - a homemade dab-rite. I would have made this a lot sooner but I got gifted a legit Dab-Rite shortly after.
But really if you think about it RPIs can be used to replace damn near any piece of expensive growing gear we use. Think about the bigass titan controls full room units that handle fans, AC, co2, etc - the logic to it is very simple and easy to either steal code for or just figure it out yourself (i’m no programmer, myself). Simple checks every XXX seconds to query the sensor. Say you have it set at 1200ppm for your desired co2 setting, sensor gets queried and it’s a simple ‘if X = desired amount shut off/stay off, if X = underneath target amount, turn on/stay on’. At that point though it’s finding the gear robust enough to take that many amps but at this point industrial automation has advanced where there’s ‘pi-like’ boards that are meant for way more beefy things. The one that caught my eye lately is…
http://www.orangepi.org/html/hardWare/computerAndMicrocontrollers/details/Orange-Pi-5-Pro.html
Linus Tech Tips on YT I think a year or two ago actually reviewed several raspberry pi style boards that have the full GPIO pin set too and this one seemed to be far and away the most potent in terms of what’s under the hood while still being able to handle the Raspberry Pi operating system without issue.
Fuck now I wanna finish my Dab-Rite project… I still wanna make a temp sensor held by a GI Joe or find an old Toxic Avenger action figure
Fun fact, I actually had one of these as a kid. Toxie fuckin rules.
Hey y’all just moved back up north didn’t have much time to read everyone’s responses. I shall be reading through tonight to expand on what I barely know to learn more.
I appreciate everyone’s replies and insight.
