Figure 6. The plot of the voltage through the capacitor as time increases.
After assembling the basic RC circuits, the next step is assembling a circuit in Monostable mode. Since the capacitors and the resistors were measured values the only calculations needed in assembling this circuit were to figure out the values of the resistor in series with the capacitor which was found by using 30 seconds as the time and 470µF as the resistor and plugging those values into Equation 1 to get that the resistor needed was a 55.5kΩ resistor. After assembling the circuit as shown in Figure 3 the accuracy of the time it took the light to cut off (as shown in Table 2) can be acquired by calculating a percent error (as seen in Equation 6). The average percent error was 11.5% which means that with the measured resistance the time should have been 28.69 seconds and the approximate time measured by the stop watch was 31.59 seconds which is also shown in Table 1. Figure 7 illustrates the plot of the measured “time on” values in comparison to the RC time constant values. This graph shows they are proportional and therefore one can conclude that the correct …show more content…
This mode used the current limiting resistor and the LED as the output and the two resistors in parallel (as seen in Figure 4) to create a multivibrator in which the light blinks at a frequency of 1 Hz. The frequency of the blinks was calculated by using the 1 second as the time and using equation 5. To test the accuracy of this calculation, the amount of blinks were counted for 5 minutes, which should have produced 300 blinks at 1 blink per second (found by converting 5 minutes into seconds) and then compared to the theoretical frequency. The amount of blinks or vibrations counted was 283. Since theoretical amount was 300 and only 283 were measured the percent error was calculated to be 5.67%. This percent error also comes from the human reaction