Yesterday’s post tried to create a new data point for measuring the forward drop voltage over a red LED at a slightly higher current. To summarize:

• the voltage over the LED was read out as 2.229 V
• the LED current was calculated to be 10.71 mA

But not so fast. What about component tolerances? What if the 100 Ω resistor isn’t exactly 100 Ω? And what if the supply voltage isn’t exactly 3.3 V?

It turns out that there’s quite a bit more going on here. Time to get the multimeter out and measure these values. If nothing else, this will be useful as cross-check against everything we did so far.

Here’s what I found (expected vs. actually measured):

• 3.3V power supply = 3.298 V
• “1” on VIN = 3.036 V (!)
• “0” on VLOW = 0.213 V (!)
• voltage over LED = 2.011 V
• 100 Ω resistance = 99.7 Ω
• current out of VIN = 7.85 mA
• current into VLOW = 7.72 mA

Whoa – very different outcomes!

First off, this is a Voltcraft VC940 multimeter with 5-digit readout and a specified accuracy on DC voltage and current ranges (substantially) below 1%. For up to 4V, that means it shouldn’t be off by more than 20..30 mV, worst case.

First the good news: the power supply voltage on the 3.3V rail is very close to the desired voltage (3298 mV).

But check out those “1” and “0” digital I/O voltages: they are 3036 and 213 mV, respectively, i.e. around 10% off!

There’s a very simple explanation for that, and as it turns out, it’s in fact fully according to specs. Here is the output voltage you get when powering an ATmega at 3V, while drawing some current from one I/O pin:

As you can see, there’s just about a 0.3V drop at 25°C when drawing 10 mA. These I/O pins were not meant to be used as power supplies for other circuits, let alone as reference for analog circuitry.

Another way to put it, is that an I/O pin on an ATmega has an internal resistance of around 30 Ω. It’s easy to see that when we start drawing several milliamps through a 100 Ω resistor, then those “perfect” I/O signal lines are in fact a lot less like a real switched power supply.

The same holds for the “0” pin voltage levels. Once you start dumping current into such an I/O line, it will start to look more and more like a resistor tied to ground, and not just a direct connection to ground.

So the first conclusion is that the LED isn’t being fed as much current as we had expected, because the voltage levels are not quite 3.3V and 0V.

Let’s recaclulate our results with this new insight:

• VIN = 3.036 V
• VHIGH = 2.229 V (same as before, via the ADC)
• VLOW = 0.213 V
• voltage over the LED = 2.229 – 0.213 = 2.016 V
• 99.7 Ω resistor voltage = 3.036 – 2.229 = 0.807 V
• current through resistor = 0.807 / 99.7 = 8.1 mA

Ah, that’s a lot better: 2.016 V calculated vs. 2.011 V measured, and 8.1 mA calculated vs. 7.85 mA measured (about 3% off, oh well).

One last puzzle: why is the current measured out of VIN not the same as the current into VLOW?

You’ll need to check the schematic again to see what’s going on. Since the VLOW voltage is not 0V as would be the case with a perfect I/O output, there is now also some current flowing from VLOW to GND, through that other 1 kΩ resistor.

How much? Well, Ohm’s law points to the answer, as always: 0.213 V over 1 kΩ means there is 0.21 mA flowing through that resistor. Since the only source of power is VIN, and since all current must flow either into VLOW or GND, this means we can add that 0.21 mA to 7.72 mA to get 7.93 mA total.

Ok, it’s not conclusive in that some unexplained differences still remain, but this is nevertheless a lot closer to the real values in the circuit than the original 2.2V @ 11 mA we arrived at earlier.

Note that we don’t really need a multimeter to be able to make these corrections. I could have tied VIN to another analog input, to be able to use the digital I/O as (imperfect) power supply for the circuit, while at the same time measuring the voltage drop due to the higher current. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

There’s a lot more to be said about this sort of design and measurement work. Electronics is a very large field, and all we did so far, was hook up 4 simple components!

One very interesting option, is to simulate the circuit instead of building it on a breadboard. There is a well-known application for that called SPICE which takes a circuit description and computes, time step by time step, how the circuit behaves when subjected to certain input signals and power conditions.

JGJ Veken (Joop on the forum & wiki) was very kind to help out with a simulation of the LED discharge circuit I’ve been describing in these weblog posts. Here’s what came out:

The voltage levels are slightly different, because the LED charateristics are different, but you can clearly see more or less the same graph as shown in yesterday’s post. Just to drive tht point home: yesterday’s results were measured in a real circuit, whereas the graph above is a simulation performed 100% inside a computer.

To find out more about this exciting way to try out circuits and explore different parameter settings, see these excellent wiki pages by JGJ Veken: 5Spice and LTSpiceIV. These are two different systems (both with common ancestry), the former commercial but free for personal use, and the latter available from Linear Technology as freeware (I don’t think either of them is open source).

So there you have it. This concludes my mini-series about experimenting with simple components, and using JeeNodes and Arduino’s to investigate the circuit and create a simple test-jig setups for it. Combine that with the SPICE simulation options available out there, and you’ve got a very simple and low-cost way to exlore electronics for yourself. Transistors? Filters? Op-amps? Go for it – there’s a world out there to explore and tinker with!