You said it: "Time taken to charge and discharge can be calculated." This allows us to use fancy math to make electrons dance any dance we want, from pulling the buzz out of electricity that we want to be clean, to putting the zing into electricity that we want to resonate - for instance, creating a musical note in an electric piano. IOW, caps allow us to remove and create frequencies accurately and reliably. This puts music and speech on top of radio waves, alphabetic characters on a video screen, and squeezes wall-shaking rumbles out of subwoofers.
You may have misread that documentation you have that says capacitors do not pass AC. That's kind of generally what happens, but what your book most likely means is that capacitors give us the means to control what frequencies of AC are allowed, and which are not.
The diagram for calculating relations between voltage, resistance, current and power (wattage) in a linear (ohmic) resistance:
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If you know the voltage and the resistance of a resistor you follow the line from the voltage scale and the line from the resistance scale to the point where they meet. From that point go to the other scales and you see the current and the wattage (power) on the other scales.
Use a pen to point at the meeting point in the beginning, later it is easy to just focus your eyes on a certain point. Very handy when your hands are occupied with a soldering iron and components.
I have added some colors to the diagonal resistance scale which are the third ring color on resistors, and I have extended the diagram upwards to calculate higher currents than the original diagram.
Sorry about the messy look but I have used this for many years and added lines as I needed it. I used a scanner to get it off the front cover of my homemade workbench handbook. I would love to see a better version of the diagram.
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The diagram for calculating inductance, capacitance, impedance and frequency:
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This is also very useful for calculation of resonance frequency in LC circuits, see where the L-value and the C-value meet, and see what frequency that gives.
It works in the same way, it gives a simple visual graphic solution instead of using equations and a calculator.
There are more groups which are very helpful and relatively nice, try alt.comp.freeware for discussions and announcements of free software for all your needs. The participators in a.c.f vote for the best freeware in all categories every year, so you can easily find the best free software for any purpose.
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And handbooks can be lost, or stolen, or destroyed, but having once
heard "Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly", it's
with you for life.
In the angloamerican world it is seen as some kind of cheating to use diagrams, they want people to memorize a lot of formulas instead.
In Europe (Germany) it is much more accepted to use diagrams. The first diagram above is actually copied from a german book originally. They use diagrams for many types of calculations.
I read an article in Wireless World many years ago about english and american engineers visiting an electronics congress in Germany, and the article made fun of the way german engineers always had a pocket book (Schlau Buch = Sly Book = Handbook) with them and how they looked up things instead of having everything memorized in their brains as the angloamericans tried to do.
It has been an ideological difference in the way we teach and learn things.
The germans think more like this; If we simplify everything as much as possible we can free more energy and time to learn even more instead of wasting our time with remembering equations, and making calculations with pen and paper.
The british always want to do things "the right way", learning the proper equations and doing the math. And american like to memorize things, even when it fills no sensible practical purpose, like learning strange sentences to remember the colors in the resistor color code.
I have tried to create better looking versions of these diagrams, using a graph paper design program which could create logaritmic scales vertically and horisontally. Then I took a copy of that diagram into a paint program, rotated it 45 degrees and tried to superimpose it on the original diagram, to create logaritmic scales diagonally as well as vertically and horisontally.
But it didn't work so well, the program didn't produce diagrams which were suitable for this. So I'll wait for better graph paper design programs, or hope somebody else will create such diagrams.
You are free to copy and distribute these diagrams as you like, I cannot keep them on a free web site indefinitely. Such web sites are often closed down unexpectedly.
I personally have grown weary of how electronics is taught in America. I wanted to see your diagrams, but it said that there is no Hotlinking, (whatever that is), and to visit the site directly.
Nah. Pocket calculators. And then when they go to work, they only have to press the buttons with the pictures of the burgers and fries, and the POS terminal does all of the math for them.
As others have already pointed out this introduces an unnecessary step in the thinking process. It is a lot easier to learn to associate the color with a number directly.
The best way to learn the colors is to sort a few hundred mixed resistors using a color code table.
After that you need only look at that table occasionally to reinforce the color you are not sure about.
How do you learn the multiplication table in your schools?
Do you have some foul language mnemonic sentences for that too?
And what happens if you see a few movies from Hollywood filled with more extreme foul language wordings which I will not exemplify here.
Do you get your colors codes and multiplication tables all mixed up then?
I am pretty sure you don't even use such mnemonics yourself when you look at a resistor. You associate the color with a number directly, don't you?
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I had no problems clicking on the links I gave you, so I thought it would work for others too, but now I realize they have put a cookie on my computer so they know I am the owner, so I am allowed to go to the picture directly.
For them to be available for other people I had to re-edit my index.html, and I have done that now. I hope it will work now.
Try this link
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Then click on the two .jpg files at the bottom of the list.
Please tell me if it doesn't work, 'cause I want them to be available to you and others.
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