Okay, so today I messed around with something called a MOSFET, which I learned can be used like a switch. I thought, why not give it a shot and see how this thing works?
First off, I found out that these MOSFET things have three legs – they call them Source, Gate, and Drain. The whole idea is to control the electricity flowing from the Source to the Drain using the Gate. I needed to play around with the voltage at the Gate to make it do what I wanted. The plan was to put some voltage on the Gate and see if I could make the current go through or stop it like turning a water faucet on and off.
I grabbed an N-channel MOSFET from my toolbox. From what I gathered, if I put enough voltage on the Gate, more than some specific level they call the “threshold,” this thing should switch “on.” I connected the Source to the negative side of my power supply and the Drain to a small LED in series with a resistor, and then to the positive side. The resistor is there to make sure I don’t fry the LED. I used a separate adjustable power supply to feed the Gate.
- Started Experimenting: I turned the power on and slowly started increasing the voltage on the Gate from zero.
- Observation 1: Nothing happened at first. The LED stayed off, meaning no current was flowing through from the Drain to the Source.
- Observation 2: Then, I hit a point where the voltage was just over what they said was the threshold for this MOSFET, and bam! The LED lit up. This meant the MOSFET was now “on,” letting current flow through.
I played around with it a bit more, dropping the Gate voltage below the threshold and then above it again. Every time I went above the threshold, the LED would light up. Below, it would turn off. It was just like using a regular switch, but instead of flipping it physically, I was doing it with voltage.
Further Tinkering
I got curious and thought, what if I make this automatic? So, I connected the Gate to a microcontroller’s output pin. This way, I could write some simple code to pulse the output high and low, effectively turning the MOSFET on and off at intervals. I set it up, uploaded the code, and watched the LED blink. Success! Now I had an electronically controlled switch.
This whole experiment really showed me how you could use a MOSFET to control a circuit. It’s pretty neat because you can switch things on and off without any moving parts, just by controlling the voltage. It’s easy to see why these things are used everywhere in electronics. I can already think of a bunch of other projects where this could come in handy. Maybe next time, I’ll try using it to control something a bit more exciting than an LED. But for now, I’m calling it a day. Mission accomplished!
