So context, I’m a maintenance engineer in training and I’ve been looking up tool that will be handy for various jobs etc. One common suggestion is a piece of wire to bypass a circuit.
What does this mean? I’d ask my supervisor but I’m not sure whether that’s something we would do.
In: Engineering
The circuit would be a wire of its own essentially, bypassing it would mean exactly what it sounds like, you hook up a different wire in place of that circuit. It begins/ends at or near the same place the bypassed circuit would.
It really depends.
If you have a circuit whose job is to, say, give 12V to a motor when a password is successfully entered, you can “bypass” it by just directly connecting the 12V battery to the motor with a wire.
If you have a circuit, whose job is to amplify the signal from a turntable to a speaker, no, you can’t just connect a wire from the 12V battery to a speaker. That’s not gonna give you music.
It is often done to trouble shoot. Take a furnace for example. Circuit goes from furnace to tstat and back. When tstat calls for heat circuit is closed and power is delivered to next component. You can connect a wire directly to the same spot as the tstat wires and bypass the tstat. So instead of going to tstat and back it is a direct connection between the 2 points of contact.
Many machines are controlled by switches. A switch turns on your refrigerator’s compressor when it’s needed. A button turns on a desktop computer. A thermostat turns on the heat when the temperature gets cold.
When your furnace isn’t working…. is it something wrong with the furnace or is it maybe the thermosatt not actually telling it to turn on?
With a piece of wire you can link the two wires that otherwise the thermostat is supposed to control the link between. You bypass the thermostat to see if the furnace turns on.
In other words, a “hot” line is how many machines or parts of machines are turned on and off with some kind of switch between deciding to interrupt or allow the power to flow. Sometimes, it’s the switch that is bad and all you have to do is provide a different path for the power.
Also there’s just wires running from point to point, sometime not easy to reach. There can be breaks in those wires.
In your job you will find that there are circtuits with switches, contactors, timer, etc. sometimes when you troubleshoot something you need to bypass these to test or to make the machine run while you get the proper replacement part or fix it, having a piece of wire that allows you connect one end of the circuit to the other side of these elements bypasasing it’s very handy specially if it allows you good control/connection/safety such as the 2 ends of multimeter probes connected to each other.
Example:
Say you have an elctronic locking bolt on a door. To retract the bolt and unlock the door, you have to pass an electrical current through a servo that’s connected to it. The circuit for that servo is controlled by a transistor that’s connected to a computer chip. Normally the transistor would switch on or off, just like a light switch when signaled by the chip that’s controlling it and allow current to pass through the transistor, completing the circuit and activating the servo. The chip might be on a timer, attached to a keypad, etc.
Now, let’s say that chip is broken, and can’t send a signal to the transistor, but you still need to get the door open. If you take a piece of wire, and connect it to the terminals of the transistor, you will create a new circuit path that allows the current to bypass the transistor entirely and go directly to the servo, this will complete the circuit, activate the servo, and retract the locking bolt.
Hmm i use a wire to bypass a circuit in my subwoofer. The circuit basically turns off the unit if no signal is sent from the player in a specific amount of time. i looked into it online and got a diagram. Is that what you mean?
So basically the wire is acting as whatever it replaces? So you’d connect the wire to the place that the broken thing should be connected into?
So would this be useful if you thought the “thing” was broken, you’d put the wire in, and if it powers up you know thst it’s that thing that’s broken?
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