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An LED is a light-emitting diode. Lighting an LED is considered the "Hello world" of a circuit design, and it can be as simple as using a series resistor, or it can get more complicated, involving PWM and multiplexing.

16 votes
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Why is the symbol for "cathode" a 'K'?

I would think that it's because of the origin of the word: kathodos Greek \$\kappa\alpha\theta\omicron\delta\omicron\varsigma{}\hspace{7pt}\$ (kathodos), descent : kat-, kata-, cata- + hodos, way …
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4 votes

Doesn't using resistors serial to LEDs all the time waste a lot of energy?

The wasted power is often very small (tens of milliwatts) if you're driving the LED with 5 V or an equally small voltage. … Sure, it is a problem in systems where you have limited-capacity batteries, but then other schemes (like LED drivers using PWM) are used. …
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1 vote

How to control an LED light by the output of a matlab program?

The simplest way I see is to use a microcontroller with USB and then write MATLAB code to interface to the microcontroller. Or the microcontroller's UART + an USB/UART IC and then use MATLAB's seri …
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3 votes

How is power affected on a step-up transformer, does it change?

As for your light bulb example, probably your 11 W LED light outputs light that is equivalent to a 50 W incandescent light bulb. …
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2 votes

What does this symbols means on the LCD pin outs?

From the drawing, A is the anode and RK, BK, GK are the cathodes of the red/green/blue LEDs respectively.
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