For those of you that are like me and are new to computer science & electrical engineering, but motivated and passionate about learning more in this field of study you may find this to be interesting.
LED’s are cool lights and some may have noticed their ability to dim or brighten. For example, some electronics dim leds to show they are low battery or asleep. To get the LED’s to dim, one can achieve this using two techniques.. I believe.
The first is to regulate the voltage, I guess thats an analog solution because regulating the voltage would round out the curve of the wave.
The second is to blink the LED at at different frequencies or different duty cycles. This would be a digital solution because the wave/signal block is either long or short. This second solution is cool because essentially the controller is turning the LED on and off for longer or shorter periods of time. I call this blinking. Blinking at different intervals tricks the human eye to see that the LED is either dim or bright. If the LED is dim it’s flickering on for shorter time periods. The led gets turned off and on really fast, defining the period, and the time the led is on vs off is defined as the duty cycle. Both are key to defining rates for LEDs that are bright or dim. If the period is too large, or the duty cycle is too small, you may not see the led, or may see some flickering. Here are some pics I took from the logic analyzer that show the digital wave of an led that is pulsed to first be dim, then brighten, then dim. check it out:
One way to see this in action is dim an LED with a digital signal and then physically move the LED back and forth within your line of sight. This way you can see how it’s turning on and off.
Lastly I got to thinking about the nature of digital electronics. First and foremost, please excuse my lack of experience with computers and engineering. I’m just beginning my journey in this wonderful world of computers and electronics, but my passion for it is growing exponentially. I guess this is just the nature of a transistor..
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