A new series aimed at people who want to understand parts without the usual maths or jargon has landed, and the opening episode takes on the capacitor being charged by a steady current. The idea of teaching electronics in plain English with as little number-crunching as possible feels like exactly what a lot of self-taught builders could use, and the maker keeps that promise throughout.
The whole thing is put together on a whiteboard with dry-erase markers and an eraser, which I think suits the topic well. It starts from two parallel metal plates separated by an insulator, defines capacitance as stored charge divided by voltage, and then writes out Q = C * V before moving on to I = C * (dV / dt). The worked example is easy to follow: one ampere ramping a capacitor up to three volts over three seconds, plotted as a straight line.
What stands out to me is that the lesson does not stop at theory. An op-amp relaxation oscillator is drawn to show how a capacitor sets timing intervals, and the straight-line ramp is tied back to the voltage waveform in that circuit. Discharging with negative current is covered too, producing a downward slope and a triangle waveform.
It is clearly part one of a bigger plan, with the series set to cover other components. The outro previews charging at constant voltage as the next lesson, so there is more to come.
Project by The AudioPhool. Watch it on their YouTube channel: