Schematic Diagrams

Being able to read and understand schematic diagrams is an essential part of working as an electronics technician or when working with any sort of DIY project that involves wiring.

Schematic diagrams are pictorial representations of how the circuit is wired and how connections are made. The symbols do not always look like their real life counterparts but it makes it much easier to draw a schematic symbol than something that resembles the actual component.

Here are some common schematic symbols as well as what the component looks like in real life

Battery:

The longer line up top is the positive connection and the smaller line on bottom is the negative connection. I'm sure we all know what a battery looks like in real life and that 9 volt up there is just one example

Resistor:

Resistors don't have a negative or positive lead and can be connected either way, resistors come in varying sizes of resistance that are indicated by the color code of the resistor, I will go into the resistor color codes in a future post.

Incandescent light:

Lets hook these up and see how they would look in a schematic symbol

Here we have the battery hooked in series with the resistor and the lightbulb. When I say in series I mean that if any of those connections was to be open the entire circuit would cease to operate. I will cover series and parallel circuits in a future posting as well.

These are just a few of the probably hundreds or even thousands of different schematic symbols there are out there and I will cover more complex ones in future postings.