If you’re new to the world of interactive Electronics, you might be a little overwhelmed. However, there is a tool that will help you learn interactive Electronics fast and for free. And that too is TinkerCad.
Tinkercad is a free-of-charge, online 3D modeling and circuitry program that runs in a web browser. And we will use TinkerCad to create our very first circuit, which will light up an LED with the flick of a switch.
If you are more of a video kind of person, below is a video recording of this lesson that goes through each step of the process.
Tinkercad Interface
Before we begin, let’s take a quick tour of the tinker cad interface.
Below, I list the tools and areas we will use for this project.
- Project Type selection panel – Select the type of project you want to make (3d modeling or electrical circuits)
- Create a new project – Creates a new project
- Components panel – A list of all the components available
- Workspace – the area you will drop your components on.
- Run simulation – Start and stop the simulation
- Autosave – Signifies that the autosave feature is enables
- Change wire color – choose this to change the color of a wire
- Change wire connection type – choose this to change the wires connection type
- Change component orientation – Rotates the component
Step 1: Entering TinkerCad circuits.
The first step is to open TinkerCad circuits (not 3d modeling). You can do this by navigating to the left-most panel of the homepage and selecting circuits. Next, select create a new circuit.
Step 2: Choosing a power source
Take a look at the components panel. This is where all our components are by default. It will only show you the basic ones by default. If you want to see all the available components within TinkerCad circuits, click the dropdown and select all.
The first thing we want is that any circuit needed Is a power source. So type in “power” in the components panel on the components panel.
Let’s take a look at the battery options.
- 9-volt battery
- 3.5v Coin cell battery
- 1.5v AA battery
If you click on the component, you can give it a name. The 1.5v battery has an additional feature that lets you add or remove extra batteries as necessary or change from AA to AAA.
For this demonstration, I’m going to choose the night 9-volt battery.
If you pay close attention to each battery, you’ll notice that they all share one thing in common. They all have a terminal. This is where you will attach your wires. The red terminal is positive, and the black wire is your negative or Ground Terminal.
Step 3: Choosing an LED
All right, so now that we have our battery of choice, we can grab some more of the tools we need. So the next item that we will pull out is our LED.
What is an LED?
Led stands for light-emitting diode. Once you place your LED, you’ll notice a little bent leg. In an actual LED, you will see a longer leg and a shorter leg in an actual LED. However, in this diagram, we see a bent leg instead representing where terminals should be connected to.
The long leg (or bent leg) is called the Anode side, and The shorter leg is the cathode.
Connect the positive terminal of your battery to the positive terminal of your LED and the negative Terminal to be short to the shorter leg of the LED.
Note: You can change the color of the wire. The best practice is to make the positive side of things red and the negative black.
We now have a completed circuit. Let’s test out what happens if we click Start simulation.
It seems like it exploded, but why is this? Thankfully for us, TinkerCad tells us exactly what went wrong. All you have to do is hover over the explosion, and it tells you what went wrong. In our case, there was too much current going through the LED, so it popped. We will prevent them from happening again with a resistor.
Step 4: Choosing a resistor
To prevent our LED from exploding again, we’re going to need to limit the amount of current that’s going into it. This is where resistors come into play.
What is a resistor?
A resistor is exactly what it sounds like. It resists the flow of electricity. Resistors have values denoted in ohms, the Greek letter for Omega. The values are also color-coded right on the LEDs. See those different colored stripes? That’s a visual representation of the ohm value.
To know what ohm value your resistor has. You can actually click on the resistor and change the resistance values, and as you do that, you’ll notice that the colors also change.
Let’s go ahead and grab a resistor from our components panel.
Connect the bent leg of the LED to the resistor. Then connect the other side of the resistor to the positive terminal of your battery. You can use either side of the resistor.
Now let’s go ahead and run this simulation, and look at that! The LED turns on!
But there’s a problem. It’s always on. We want to find a way to turn this circuit on and off so that we don’t waste our battery and make our circuit a little more interesting. So let’s look for a switch.
Step 5: Selecting a switch
Go over to our components panel and look at a sliding switch.
Now, take the positive terminal from your battery and connect that to the middle terminal of the switch. You will then want the rightmost terminal of your switch to connect to the LED. There’s no need to change the colors of the wires connected to the switch. The switch will intake positive energy and output positive energy.
Now that when the switch is flicked, it will complete the circuit. Let’s turn on the simulation and see what happens when we flick it.
Step 6: Using a breadboard
Okay, so we have an LED with a switch, and everything seems to work just like we wanted it to. However, it’s kind of clunky. If we were going to make this in real life, it would be difficult to move this around, and we’ll need to solder the components together, which will get messy.
We can use a breadboard to make our life a little easier.
What is a breadboard?
A breadboard is a small flat surface that allows you to connect electrical circuits with ease. There is no soldering required, and everything is laid out in a grid-like fashion, making things clean and easy to work with.
The red line denotes positive, and the black indicates negative. These are, of course, not positive until you make them positive or negative by connecting them to your power source.
If you hover over the positive and negative terminals you’ll notice that the whole rows turn green. This is to signify that The rows are interconnected. Similarly, if you hover over the inside of the Bread Board, you will notice that the internal rows light up green as well. These are also interconnected, so if you connect two things in this row, they will all be connected, the same as soldered together.
Now that you know what a breadboard is and how it works. Let’s put it into action and make a nicer-looking circuit.
Connect the positive terminal battery to the positive terminal of the breadboard. Now the entire rail we connected to our power supply has power. We also want to connect our negative terminal on a battery to the negative terminal of the breadboard.
We can place our LED wherever we want. Bring over your resistor. Make sure to place it close to the LED. You don’t have to do this, but the whole point of raising a breadboard was to keep things nice and tidy. So we might as well keep things nice and neat.
Make sure to place your resistor on the same rail as the positive side of the LED. You don’t need to connect them with a wire. Remember, the rails are connected internally. So you just have to make sure to have the positive terminal of the LED on the same rail as one of the legs of the resistor.
We can now provide the resistor some power to the LED by connecting the positive rail of the breadboard to the resistor.
Don’t forget to connect the negative terminal of your LED to the negative rail of the breadboard.
We also want to include that switch. So grab the switch, place it on the breadboard, and connect it just like previously. Your circuit should look something like this.
Now, when you click to start the simulation, everything should be just as before, just a little nicer.
Common components
Check out this infographic that shows the most commonly used electrical components.
Conclusion
Using a TinkerCad circuit is a great way to learn how electronic circuits work. It’s free and really easy to use. And now that you know how to light up an LED on TinkerCad, you’re ready to start exploring all the other components the software has to offer.
This concludes our tutorial on lighting up an LED on TinkerCad circuits. If you want to lean more, check out our full interactive electronics module here.