How electrical power is generated

Have you ever wondered where electricity comes from? You might be surprised to learn
that it comes from magnets!
In the early 1800s, Michael Faraday discovered "electromagnetic induction", which is
the scientific way of saying that if he moved a magnet through a loop of wire, the wire
would become electrified.
In 1882, Thomas Edison opened the first full-scale power plant in New York City.
Edison's electric generator was a bigger version of Faraday's basic experiment; a big
magnet rotates around a wire to produce an electric current.
Today's power plants are bigger and controlled by computers, but the basic process is
still the same as it was nearly 120 years ago.

Resistors

A resistor is an electronic component designed to oppose an electric current by

producing a voltage drop between its terminals in pro- portion to the current.
Resistance is always measured in ohm and can also be presented as the symbol . The
most common multi- pliers for resistance calculations is:
kilo ohm which is the same as a 1000 megohm which is the same as

1000000

All resistors are color coded. Resistors can have 4, 5 or 6 colder bands and it is these
bands that tell you the resistance of the resistor. The first three bands are digits that
follow this color digit scheme:
black 0
brown 1
red 2
orange 3
yellow 4
green 5
blue 6
purple 7
 gray 8
white 9

If the three bands are brown, red and blue this would translated to 126. The forth band
is the multiplier. You multiple the first three digit by this band and then you get the
resistance of your resistor.

The fourth band follows the below colour scheme:

silver 0.01
gold 0.1
black 1
brown 10
red 100
orange 1k
yellow 10k
green 100k
blue 1M
purple 10M

The fifth band is the tolerance of the resistor and the sixth band is used for temperature
coefficient. Its hard to learn resistor calculations by heart so it recommended using a
online resistor calculator to be certain. If you google resistor calculator you will find a
lot of them.

LED

A light emitting diode (LED) is a semi conducting diode that lights up when electric
current is applied in the forward direction of the LED.

There are three different ways of telling the forward direction of a LED.

The first is to look at the legs of the LED. There will be one that is longer. This long leg
will be the one connected to where the power comes from and the short leg needs to be
connected to the ground of the power source(1).

The second way to tell what way of a LED is to look at the shape of the plastic
bubble(2). The lower rim of the bubble should have one side that is flat and it is the leg
of that side that should go to you power and the other side should go to ground.

The third way is to hold a LED up to a light and have a look inside. There will be two
pegs, one small and one big(3).The leg that goes to the small peg is the one that should
be connected to the ground and the leg on the big peg should be connected to power.