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01 - Direct Current
I'm going to skip the lesson on electrical safety, so know that you'd be doing any experiments at your own risk. Also, I'm skipping Alternating Current. You might want to look up lessons on basic electronics if you find that you actually want to do some of the cool stuff. My goal is to focus on Direct Current, which has some fun bits to it, but it's simpler.
With direct current, electricity flows from the "ground" or the negative part of a battery, to the voltage source, or the positive part of the battery. The naming conventions are complex, namely for a mix of safety, complications, and the fact that it's sometimes important to specify whether or not something's getting power from a battery, a generator, USB, etc. Anyway, I'll give you my own model to save you from the waterfall model.
Current (measured in amperes) is the movement of electrons (some say charge carrying particles, but realistically, only electrons) of a certain amount by a certain distance (enjoy looking this one up, but you don't have to). Voltage (measured in volts) is the pull, or the desire to create current. Resistance (measured in ohms) is the anti-voltage of sorts. All known conductors have some sort of resistance, but for most applications this is negligible (in fact, you want to add at least one ohm, usually).
Now, think of sailboats in a straight racing lane. The voltage is the wind pushing on the boat, the resistance is a counter-wind blowing the other way, the innate resistance is the mass of the water that the boat must cut throuogh to move, and the current is the actual speed of the boat. Simple, right? If that's not enough for you to understand, keep trying. I remember spending over a day trying to figure this out, especially since alot of the other models out there are unnecessarily confusing.
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