Transistors are the basis of virtually every electronic device created today. And their invention literally changed the world. ![]() This work resulted in all three men earning the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect. A year later Shockley invented and patented the first bipolar transistor. ![]() In 1947 American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working under physicist William Shockley at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, invented the first point-contact transistor. Today we will learn to use these components to extend the current-driving capability of our Arduino designs. These are basic electronic components that are used in a myriad of applications, in fact, the Arduino itself is a collection of transistors on a single chip. The driver boards we have been using accomplish their magic using devices like transistors and MOSFETs. In these cases, the driver board did all of the heavy lifting for us. We accomplished this by using a driver board to take the low-current Arduino control signals and drive the high-current motors. Of course, that hasn’t stopped us from controlling much larger devices like gear motors and large stepper motors. It also has a pretty small current capability, limiting its use to directly controlling only small devices such as single LEDs, OLEDs, and LCD displays. The Arduino, or any microcontroller, is tiny in more than just size. The “micro” part simply means that it is a very tiny device. ![]() The very name “microcontroller” tells us that the primary purpose of this device s to control things. The Arduino is a microcontroller, you probably already know that. Follow along as we learn to use transistors and MOSFETs with our Arduino.
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