Month: December 2020

Todays trace is a DIAC or trigger diode.

Notice the retracing of the curve, its a artifact of the curve tracer.

Today it’s time for a couple capacitors.

First out is a leaky 15uF electrolytic:

Then a different capacitor, about 100uF:

The most boring picture, a resistor gives just a slope for the voltage divided by current.

You are welcome to try to figure out the resistance from the slope.

Starting today, the plan is to do a curve trace of one kind of device a day from now untill december 24. Some will just be a single trace, some will have explaination of one kind or another, and some may get full derrivation of the physics.

Today we are going to start off with a couple diodes. First out is the trusty 1N4148 diode:

Looking more closely at the forward curve:

From this curve we can determine the slope and use the Shockley diode equation to get the diode parameters.

Doing a standard unnamed Germanium diode then the trace looks like this:

And for fun, here is a Mullard OA81 curve: