Paignton Library STEM Group – April 2022 Write Up
The April STEM group meeting took place on 9/4/2022. This month we had planned to have another talk from Harding on Amplifiers, but due to circumstances beyond our control, this didn't happen. We look forward to this taking place at the next meeting.
Nevertheless, we had a busy meeting. Paul had set up an activity on voltage dividers to run alongside the discussion on amplifiers, however, as the computer connected to the whiteboard wasn't working, he just did a brief overview.
A voltage divider is a simple circuit which turns a large voltage into a smaller one. Using just two series resistors and an input voltage, we can create an output voltage that is a fraction of the input.
Voltage dividers are one of the most fundamental circuits in electronics. If learning Ohm's law was like being introduced to the ABC's, learning about voltage dividers would be like learning how to spell cat. [2]
The plan now is to hopefully do this activity at the May meeting. The idea is to construct a voltage divider, then measure the output voltages.
Rather than using breadboards, Paul has made some boards up and soldered on resistors and we can use crocodile clips to connect everything together. We also need a better power unit module, which Paul will build before the next meeting.
Component boards
Set up to demo a voltage divider. We will be using crocodile clips for this, as they are more suited to the demo and quickly building circuits.
Paul wrote an explanation on the whiteboard, which Lucy has tidied up for the photo.
Other activities:
Lucy helped an attendee to fix her laptop which wasn’t booting from the hard drive and also helped her resolve an issue with Word document versioning and spell-check.
I was helping a younger attendee and his mum with Scratch coding, which went really well. They also asked for some advice on physical computing, which ties in nicely with the CamJam kits we have, and Python. Now that we know that we have an attendee who is interested in physical computing, we can include this in our planned activities for future.
We also had a discussion on retro computing and had a quick look at a browser based zx spectrum emulator. This is really cool for playing old classic 8-bit games.
Photos
RaspberryPi
Lego WeDo
Links
- Paignton Library
- Voltage dividers
- Browser Spectrum Emulator
- CamJam Kit
- Sense about Science
- Code Club – Lost in Space
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