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
An op-amp has two inputs (let’s call them A and B) and one output.
Very simply put, it compares the two inputs. If the voltage of input A is higher than B, the output is going to be high (close to its positive supply voltage), and if the voltage of B is higher than A, the output is going to be low (close to its negative supply voltage).
In practice the output voltage is going to depend on how large the difference between A and B is, since the gain of the op-amp isn’t infinite. So you may need a difference of say 1mV to get an output swing of 1V.
That’s the most basic function of an op-amp, but you can use it to build more complex circuits that do more than just provide a high or low signal at the output. For example, you can couple the output back to one of the inputs using resistors to achieve a specific gain, say if you want to amplify to low voltage signal by a factor of 100. In reality there’s probably a thousand different things you can do with an op-amp.
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