How do circuit boards make electronics do things?
In: 4
They don’t.
Circuit boards are boards of materials that don’t let electricity pass through them, with loads of holes in them, with each hole surrounded in a conductive material. So you can connect electronic parts to each hole, in certain orders, to make electricity run in a certain path through different components.
How they do this is complicated, but essentially comes down to “if this, then that”. This is a field of thought that was referred to as logic for hundreds of years, to try and distill all thinking down to simple yes/no paths, and that became very relevant with the advent of electronic computing.
Circuit boards just connect electronic components together.
That video shows the creation of a simple light circuit with a battery and a switch.
Instead of wires, you could make that circuit with a circuit board.
A circuit board is just a piece of non-conductive material with copper “traces” along the surface. The traces connect the components the same way the wires do.
[Circuit boards are wires](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Computerplatine_Wire-wrap_backplane_detail_Z80_Doppel-Europa-Format_1977_(close_up).jpg). They’re just layers of [wires](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D5EC12/blue-printed-circuit-board-or-abstract-background-D5EC12.jpg) pressed together into a rigid board.
The point is to connect the outputs of [electronic chips](https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/1851253342/display_1500/stock-photo-closeup-electronic-circuit-board-pcb-components-detail-and-an-integrated-circuit-ic-1851253342.jpg) to power and to each other, and the electronic chips will do “things”.
The chips contain miniaturized transistors, capacitors, resistors, and other components that manipulate, store, and release electricity in certain patterns that allows ultimately patterns to form on the screen (which you recognize as words, an image, a website, etc.), audio patterns to be vibrated by the speakers (sound), droplets of ink to be squirted on a page by a printer, and so on.
The circuit boards simply provide the mountings for electronic components and provide paths between said components – all the magic is in the components, which use varying number of electrical states to create the logic of the device.
For example, a bog standard switch ( Such as a light switch.) has two states, one where the circuit connects to power something on the other side or disconnected to not allow the circuit to complete.
We’ve reached the point where we can create components at the nano scale and can create rather complex logic.
I’m taking a programming class and just had this click for me, so i’ll add a little onto what others have said.
At their core, electronics really only understand if they have electricity flowing or not. So circuit boards and other electronics are made up of billions of tiny “light switches” that turn the power on to certain parts if the right conditions are met (ex. it senses you typed a number, it will light up the switch in memory a certain way to remember that number!). They used to be huge when they were invented, which is why you needed one person physically flipping all the switches. We’ve found ways to condense them down, which is why our tiny electronics can do so much.
Reddit is SO cool, thanks for all these great answers, y’all!!
Turns out if you hit a rock just right then throw power through it, you can make the rock think.
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