What is a resistor?

hey everyone I'm Angie and today I'm going to be introducing you to the wonderful world of resistors simply put without these amazing little guys the electronics world as we know it would not exist resistors are some of the most important components in a circuit because we use them to adjust and limit current they look like this a metal piece of wire with a material stuck in the middle you know this is going to be hard to explain with this resistor being so small and all I wish I could make make it bigger somehow wa tubular

fun fact this is exactly what resistors look like under a microscope trust me here's how it works the current starts at this end of the resistor moves through the wire hits the material which adjusts the current and then exits through this wire these wires at the ends here are called the legs of the resistor now let's see all the shapes and sizes a resistor can take starting with these tiny little guys and moving on to this form factor which you'll see in your kit and then getting a little bigger and a little bigger and sometimes

they even look like this the amount of resistance a resistor provides is measured in a unit called ohms it's spelled omms but usually we shorten this by using the Greek letter Omega and here's the kicker all these resistors even though they're different sizes are all the same amount of resistance but why do we even need resistors why do we have to control current in the first place can I just plug this light into a battery and call it a day you know what that sounds great I'm going to do that right now resistors are pointless

and I'm going to prove it I'm a Pioneer I'll use my nlab as the power source and put the long leg of this led into Power the 5vt column and the short leg of the LED into ground easy peasy me do that so the LED is plugged into the end lab with no resistor I'm a genius I'm going to turn it on now and okay what just happened oh God did I break it I broke my own [Music] product actually no the green flashing lights mean that the N lab has detected that something is wrong

and it switched itself off because of this so what I'm going to do now is take the LED out of here going to hit the power button now the nlab is powered off power it back on and it should be good to go so it's completely protected itself thanks n laab n laab get yours today okay what the hell happened you you guys saw saw that right it came on for a second and then it kind of petered out and then the nend laab started doing its freaky green flashing thing well what you actually saw

is that the LED burned out let's watch that again in fancy slow moo why did it burn out well the LED can only handle a certain amount of current and we gave it too much and there was nothing in place to limit the current come into the lightboard studio with me and I'll introduce you to a special friend who will explain this way better than I can this is barcy our dog barc's on a diet because the vet says that she's slightly overweight something about spoiling her with too many treats yada yada yada I wasn't

really pay attention barcy is the LED in this scenario if this bag of treats was unlimited there's no question in my mind that barcy would eat and eat and eat until she physically exploded just like the LED that burned out sit sit LEDs will take on all the current in the world if you let them they'll basically eat themselves to death just like my dog so resistors let us choose the right amount of food so that LEDs don't eat too much food and die I'm the resistor in this scenario that's enough food for you you're

dismissed okay we're back now looking down here we see that the burned out LED is still here and it looks like a normal LED that's pretty freaky because this led will never work again because it's been burned out so what you should do always when you know that an LED has burned out is put it directly into the trash because otherwise you're going to wind up like me and build a very complicated circuit that's not going to work right and then only hours and hours into building it will you realize that you have been using

a burned out led the whole time the whole [Music] time okay so now we know that we definitely need a resistor to make lights work even for lights like this the secret is that the resistor is actually in here even for these types of light bulbs the LED light bulbs that you use all the time they have a resistor inside that's the secret until then I'm Angie thanks for watching