Transcript from the "Wiring Up an LED" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Steve Kinney: So, this is a small LED. The color that you grab does not matter. You can either choose your favorite color or you can take the approach I did, which is choose whichever the first one you touch is and take it out of the bag. With a lot of electronic components, we say that some of them are polarized and others are non-polarized.
[00:00:22] And all that means is in some cases, the direction matters. And in other cases, the direction does not matter. So, electricity in the circuit will go from the kind of power source to the ground. So we need to complete a circuit. For non-polarized components, it doesn't matter which end goes in which part.
[00:00:42] For polarized components, it does matter, right? An LED is a polarized component, which means the way you plug it in matters. Which leads us to the next question of how do I tell? If you look very closely at your LED, you'll notice at one end is longer than the other end.
[00:01:05] That's how you tell [LAUGH]. If you ever forget, then how do you tell? You Google it, [LAUGH]. For an LED, generally speaking, you'll do this enough, you'll begin to remember that the longer end will go to the power and the shorter end will go to the ground. Later on, we're gonna be playing with an RGB LED, which have four, we'll call them prongs.
[00:01:31] I don't think that's the right term but we'll call them prongs. And they're all different lengths and the shortest one is not the ground. And so what you will likely do is look it up, probably every time that you use it. Cuz that is what I do and it seems to be successful for me.
[00:01:49] But in this case, the longer end is gonna go to our power source and the shorter end is gonna go to the ground. So, if everyone committed that diagram I showed earlier to memory, which I know that you all did. We all remember that the ground is the very first input on either port.
[00:02:13] So I can take the shorter end. I can.
>> Speaker 2: Make sure the camera can see.
>> Steve Kinney: Yeah, this is a new fun challenge. Cool, I'm gonna put the shorter end in that very first port. And the longer end is going to go into the 0 port. If you look very closely at your device, you'll see that they're labeled GND for ground, 3v3 for the power source and then 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
[00:02:43] So I want the shorter end to go into the ground and the longer end to go into the zero port.
>> Steve Kinney: After this, we'll actually be connecting jumper wires to these ports and it will be a little bit easier. Cuz you can imagine, if I had a LED in the other port, one had to go into port seven, doing it like this is not really feasible because it's not long enough.
[00:03:07] So we'll use a bread board in a little bit. But for now, we're just gonna plug it directly into the board, cool.