Sunday, 8 July 2018

led - Burned out potentiometer


DISCLAIMER: I am just tinkering with electrical engineering and can barely do the basics yet.


Background



I have done a little work on a breadboard connected to my Raspberry Pi, but today I wanted to put my new battery pack to use. I set up a simple circuit to control the brightness of an LED with a potentiometer and it worked just fine. Then in my usual how-much-can-I-change-before-it-breaks fashion, I removed the resistor to see how bright I could make the LED before it burned out (yes I know it was a dumb idea). I got the LED up until it turned red (it was a green led) and then started smelling something burning. The LED was fine but the potentimeter was what was making the smell. Yes, I unhooked everything as soon as I stared smelling burning.


Question


What did I do? I looked online and didn't find anything about burning out a potentimeter.




No comments:

Post a Comment

arduino - Can I use TI's cc2541 BLE as micro controller to perform operations/ processing instead of ATmega328P AU to save cost?

I am using arduino pro mini (which contains Atmega328p AU ) along with cc2541(HM-10) to process and transfer data over BLE to smartphone. I...