Chapter · Electricity
Inductors
The part that will not let its current change. Four pages on a coil of wire, what it stores, the rating that is not about heat, and the circuit the whole site has been telling you to use instead of a linear regulator.
- 32What an inductor is7 minA resistor decides how much current flows. An inductor decides how fast the current is allowed to change — which sounds like a footnote until you switch one off and it produces two hundred volts from a six-volt battery.
- 33Inside an inductor6 minThe energy an inductor stores is not in the copper. It is in the magnetic field in the air around it, which is why the shape of the coil and the lump in the middle of it decide everything the part is worth.
- 34Reading an inductor7 minAn inductor has two current ratings and neither of them is the one you would guess. One is about the wire getting hot. The other is about the core filling up, and when you cross it nothing gets warm — the part simply stops being an inductor.
- 35The buck converter8 minEvery page on this site that says "use a buck converter instead" has been pointing at four parts — a switch, a coil, a diode and a capacitor, arranged so that the regulator never has the input voltage and the load current in the same place at the same time.
Start at 32 and read down — the order is the order things get easier in. Or take the one with your part in it; every article stands on its own, and links back to whatever it needs.