I have a pretty solid grasp of electronic theory but for some reason op amps are confusing the ever living *frick* out of me.
Edit:. Thanks to those of you trying to dumb it down for me! I have an electronics tech assessment with Garmin on Thursday, and though I’ve worked on electronics for 14 years, including 9 in the military, those 9 years were in the Marines. I understand things better when they’re sketched with crayons 🙂
In: Engineering
You have an inverting input (-) and a non inverting input (+). If the inputs are equal, the output stays the same. If + is higher than -, the output goes up. If – is higher than +, the output goes down.
A big thing to understand is that the output depends on the internal state of the opamp, not directly on the inputs. If the inputs are the same, the output can be high, low, anywhere. What you usually do is use some negative feedback so that you get the desired output for a given input.
For example, if you want to multiply the input by 5, you connect the input to +, and divide the output by 5 before feeding it back into the – input.
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