Monday, 1/11/2016:

1. The class is formatted to where we will meet three days of the week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Monday and Wednesday will be two hour classes while Friday will only meet for one hour. On every Monday there will be a pre-quiz and every Friday a post quiz. The majority of the rest of the time will be spent on labs.

2. The important safety rules are:

• Do not work alone on energize electrical equipment.
• Power must be switched off whenever an experiment or project is being assembled or disassembled. Discharge any high voltage point to ground with a well-insulted jumper. Remember that capacitors can store dangerous quantities of energy.
• Make measurements in live circuit with well insulated probes and one hand behind your back. Do not allow any part of your body to contact any part of the circuit of equipment connected to the circuit.
• Never touch electrical equipment while standing on a damp or metal floor.
• Never handle wet, damp or ungrounded electrical equipment.
• Wearing a ring or watch can be hazardous in an electrical laboratory since such items make good electrodes for the human body.
• Never lunge for a falling part of a live circuit such as leads or measuring instruments.
• Never touch two pieces of equipment simultaneously.
• Never touch even one wire of a circuit; it may be "hot".
• Avoid heat dissipating surfaces of high wattage resistors and loads because they can cause severe burns.
• Some components have exposed metal that is electrically "hot". Take extra care when working with these components.
• Ask the instructor to check out your constructed circuit before applying power.

3. Current kills! Between .1 to .2 Amps current can kill you. Higher than .2 it may not kill you but you may experience severe burns and breathing can stop.

4. To read color codes on resistors you need to look at the colored bands on the resistor. The bands are read from left to right and each color has a different meaning. There is a video below that we made showing you a resistor!

5. Tolerance is the range of acceptable values that a resistor may have. For example, we read that a resistor should have 1,500 Ohms of resistance with +/- 5%. The +/- 5% is the tolerance, and when read with a multi meter the resistor had a value of roughly 1487 ohms. That is within the tolerance of this resistor.

6. To prove that all of our resistors are within tolerance range we measured each with the multi meter. Each of the resistors read within the +/- range that was specified.