As active devices go, it doesn’t get much simpler than a diode. Two terminals. Current flows in one direction and not in the other. Simple, right? Well, then there are examples with useful side effects like light emitting diodes. [GreatScott] points out that there are other useful diodes and, in particular, he posted a video covering Schottky and Zener diodes.
These special diodes have particular purposes. A Schottky diode has a very low voltage drop and fast switching speed. Zener diodes have application in simple voltage regulation.
A naked flame is a complex soup of ionised gases, that possesses an unexpected property. As you might expect with that much ionisation there is some level of electrical conductivity, but the unusual property comes in that a flame can be made to conduct in only one direction. In other words, it can become a diode of sorts, in a manner reminiscent of a vacuum tube diode.
The circuit is a surprisingly simple one, with a PNP transistor being turned on by the flame diode being placed in its base circuit. This allows the intensity of the flame to be measured as well as whether or not it is present, and all at the expense of a microscopic current consumption. A capacitor is charged by the transistor, and the charge time is measured by a Teensy that uses it to estimate flame intensity and trigger the pilot light if necessary. Interestingly it comes from a patent that expired in 2013, it’s always worth including that particular line of research in your investigations.
All the construction details are in the page linked above, and you can see the system under test in the video below the break.
[Hales] has been on a mission for a while to make his own diodes and put them to use and now he’s succeeded with diodes made of sodium bicarbonate and water, aluminum tape and soldered copper. By combining 49 of them he’s put together a soda bicarb diode steering circuit for a 7-segment display capable of showing the digits 0 to 9.
He takes the idea for his diode from electrolytic capacitors. A simple DIY electrolytic capacitor has an aluminum sheet immersed in a liquid electrolyte. The aluminum and the conductive electrolyte are the two capacitor plates. The dielectric is an aluminum oxide layer that forms on the aluminum when the correct polarity is applied, preventing current flow. But if you reverse polarity, that oxide layer breaks down and current flows. To [Hales] this sounded like it could also act as a diode and so he went to work doing plenty of experiments and refinements until he was confident he had something that worked fairly well.
In the end he came up with a diode that starts with a copper base covered in solder to protect the copper from his sodium bicarbonate and water electrolyte. A piece of aluminum tape goes on top of that but is electrically insulated from it. Then the electrolyte is dabbed on such that it’s partly on the solder and partly on the aluminum tape. The oxide forms between the electrolyte and the aluminum, providing the diode’s junction. Connections are made to the soldered copper and to the aluminum.
To truly try it out he put together a steering circuit for a seven segment display. For that he made a matrix of his diodes. The matrix has seven columns, one for each segment on the display. Then there are ten rows, one for each digit from 0 to 9. The number 1, for example, needs only two segments to light up, and so for the row representing 1, there are only two diodes, i.e. two dabs of electrolyte where the rows overlap the columns for the desired segments. The columns are permanently wired to their segments so the final connection need only be made by energizing the appropriate row of diodes. You can see [Hales] demonstrating this in the video below the break.
Vishay’s take on the 1N4148 data sheet (PDF), describing it as a switching diode.
When looking across the discrete components in your electronic armory, it is easy to overlook the humble diode. After all, one can be forgiven for the conclusion that the everyday version of this component doesn’t do much. They have none of the special skills you’d find in tunnel, Gunn, varicap, Zener, and avalanche diodes, or even LEDs, instead they are simply a one-way valve for electrical current. Connect them one way round and current flows, the other and it doesn’t. They rectify AC to DC, power supplies are full of them. Perhaps you’ve also used them to generate a stable voltage drop because they have a pretty constant voltage across them when current is flowing, but that’s it. Diodes: the shortest Hackaday article ever.
Not so fast with dismissing the diode though. There is another trick they have hiding up their sleeves, they can also act as a switch. It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock, after all a quick look at many datasheets for general purpose diodes should reveal their description as switching diodes.
So how does a diode switch work? The key lies in that one-way valve we mentioned earlier. When the diode is forward biased and conducting electricity it will pass through any variations in the voltage being put into them, but when it is reverse biased and not conducting any electricity it will not. Thus a signal can be switched on by passing it through a diode in forward bias, and then turned off by putting the diode into reverse bias.
For beginners, diode types can sometimes be a bit of mental gymnastics. If all it does is act like a magic pixie check valve, why are there so many kinds? Schottky diodes are typically hard to mentally set apart from the standard when described by a data sheet. Zener diodes can be downright baffling for beginners, especially when mistakenly thrown in a circuit in place of a regular 1N4001. [Afrotechmods] put together a great video explaining their difference and use cases.
In both videos he does an excellent job of describing the pros and cons while setting up experiments to exhibit each. For the Schottky it’s the faster switching and lower voltage drop. For Zener it’s less about the cons and more about exploiting its strange configuration for voltage clamps, regulators, and making expensive guitars sound bad with audio distortion circuits.
He finishes both videos with good design tips for selecting and using the parts as a burgeoning circuit designer. Diode data sheets should be less of a mystery afterwards.
Needless to say, we’re fascinated by LEDs, laser diodes, and other blinkies. Although we can get just about any light emitting thing, the data sheets aren’t always accurate or available. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Ted] is building a device to characterize the efficiency, I/V curve, and optical properties of all the blinkies. It’s a project to make glowy stuff better, and a great entry for the Hackaday Prize.
The inspiration for this project came from two of [Ted]’s projects, one requiring response curves for LEDs, and laser diodes for another. This would give him a graph of optical output vs. current, angular light output distribution, and the lasing threshold for laser diodes. This data isn’t always available in the datasheet, so a homebrew tool is the only option.
The high-level design of this tool is basically a voltmeter and ammeter measuring a glowy diode, producing IV curves and measuring optical output. That takes care of all the measurements except for the purely optical properties of a LED. This is measured by a goniometer, or basically putting the device under test on a carriage attached to a stepper motor and moving it past a fixed optical detector.
If you’re wondering why this device is needed and a simple datasheet is insufficient, check this out. [Ted] measured the efficiency of a Luxeon Z LED, and found the maximum efficiency is right around 10mA. The datasheet for this LED shows a nominal forward current of 500mA, and a maximum of 1000mA. If you just looked at the datasheet, you could easily assume a device powered for years by a coin cell would be impossible. It’s not, and [Ted]’s device gave us this information.
I learned some basic electronics in high school physics class: resistors, capacitors, Kirchhoff’s law and such, and added only what was required for projects as I did them. Then around 15 years ago I decided to read some books to flesh out what I knew and add to my body of knowledge. It turned out to be hard to find good ones.
The electronics section of my bookcase has a number of what I’d consider duds, but also some gems. Here are the gems. They may not be the electronics-Rosetta-Stone for every hacker, but they are the rock on which I built my church and well worth a spot in your own reading list.
Grob’s Basic Electronics
Grob’s Basic Electronics 12th Edition
Grob’s Basic Electronics by Mitchel E Schultz and Bernard Grob is a textbook, one that is easy to read yet very thorough. I bought mine from a used books store. The 1st Edition was published in 1959 and it’s currently on the 12th edition, published in 2015. Clearly this one has staying power.
I refer back to it frequently, most often to the chapters on resonance, induction and capacitance when working on LC circuits, like the ones in my crystal radios. There are also things in here that I couldn’t find anywhere else, including thoroughly exhaustive online searches. One such example is the correct definitions and formulas for the various magnetic units: ampere turns, field intensity, flux density…
I’d recommend it to a high school student or any adult who’s serious about knowing electronics well. I’d also recommend it to anyone who wants to reduce frustration when designing or debugging circuits.
Series-Resonance calculations
Series-Resonance schematic
You can find the table of contents here but briefly it has all the necessary introductory material on Ohm’s and Kirchhoff’s laws, parallel and series circuits, and so on but to give you an idea of how deep it goes it also has chapters on network theorems and complex numbers for AC circuits. Interestingly my 1977 4th edition has a chapter on vacuum tubes that’s gone in the current version and in its place is a plethora of new ones devoted to diodes, BJTs, FETs, thyristors and op-amps.
You can also do the practice problems and self-examination, just to make sure you understood it correctly. (I sometimes do them!) But also, being a textbook, the newest edition is expensive. However, a search for older but still recent editions on Amazon turns up some affordable used copies. Most of basic electronics hasn’t changed and my ancient edition is one of my more frequent go-to books. But it’s not the only gem I’ve found. Below are a few more.
