For us that don’t have the basics down this is a very helpful format. We can transition to more technical videos as we learn. Thank you!!!

Love this kind of stuff. Makes me appreciate the time savings provided by fancy tools.

The FET is getting hot 🔥 Lol.

This video shows how a little basic knowledge can be used to get all the information you need to characterize most components, even unknown ones. Although I do recommend people buy one of those cheap ($7 to $15) component identifier/testers. Even with my bench full of good test and measurement I find the little tester very quick, handy, and reasonably accurate to sort through new, surplus, and pulled parts. It's amazing how cheap useful test equipment has become.

The transistor is getting too hot to get a good reading - it changes specs too !

This sort of stuff is great and there isn't nearly enough anymore. Stuff like Jerry Walkers channel, he's doing a step by step design of a Switched Mode PSU. It's awesome to get walked through analogue electronics I personally am not enjoying MCU's as much as I did so I found this video very refreshing and would like to see more and of course "everybody loves chip of the day ! "....cheers

I'd recommend watching the current as you turn the knob and go in the increments of current, up to some max that is safe for the device, noting the voltage at each increment. This way you are less likely to overheat it and will get more useful data points (due to the non-linearity of the I/V curve).

That's how we did it in high school.

I recently did the same with some OpAmps. Kept them in a very basic circuit with only two pots to set the gain and running on 2 x 12V batteries. No reactive components except the ICs. Set there gain to x10 (20db) at 500Hz. Increased the freq, but left the gain controls alone. Graphed the results. Unity gain for my TL071 was about 3MHz as it should be. OPA637s and 741s were rubbish at 200kHz and 100kHz. Oh well you get what you pay for. Least I know what to throw out. Interesting exercise in spite of being a bit disappointing. Might do the same for other OpAmps in my tray.

Nice experiment, just you have to be fast enough. In the setup with 10V and 10 Ohms you pass through the point of 5V 0.5A which is 2.5W at the transistor. I was watching the drift of the output voltage to see when the transistor will give up and send a smoke signal, but it was finished soon enough and it survived. I propose tho do the experiment with a 100 Ohm resistor.

At 2:57 "... a maximum of 1 amp, so we're not going to blow up anything, okay?" Not okay. Did you miss the part of the datasheet (see 0:32 ) that states Id max = 500mA continuous? Or the part that gives maximum power dissipation of 830mW (since a 10V supply and a 10R load will allow a worst-case power dissipation in the mosfet of 5V x 0.5A = 2.5W)? At 7:40 that wasn't just the resistor getting hot, it was the mosfet passing 450mA with 5.5V across it, thus dissipating almost 2.5 W in a TO-92 package! That will give you a "junction" temperature around 400°C. Small signal mosfets are meant to be used with moderate currents. Use a 100R 1W resistor and measure up to Id = 100mA. It's just as useful a demo of the characteristics.

Cool, would you do that again vs BF256, MMBFJ202, comparison mosfet vs fet, to see how mosfets differ from fets. The simulator shows you can build differential amplifier with mosfets, but they use fets inside opamps.

Is pretty hard for TO92 to put 2.5W in for many second!!!😧 But the setup work... 🙂

Can I use the BS170 instead of a JFET like BFW10 or something ?

Remember that when the gate is on enough to draw .5A through the drain-source, the voltage across the drain-source will be 5V. 5V times .5A equals 2.5 watts. I'm pretty sure that the device was not rated for 2.5 Watts (at least not without a substantial added heat sink) and that the device was what you noticed getting hot. I'm kind of surprised that it survived the experiment.

Could you do something like this but with a 4 quadrant Triac and how and why there are 4 ?

Nice! At $20/meter you might as well have 2! That will make your measurements a bit quicker since you don't need to move your test leads around so much. Just twiddle the pot and read off the voltage across your test resistor!

Is it true that current move only on the surface of conductor.please I need answer

I'm surprise that he didn't blow his transistor. If the big resistor become hot how come the small transistor didn't blow up?

Anybody else hear FET and think of a JFET and not a MOSFET?

Why is it called "transfer characteristics"?

V vds ❤

Doing this procedure by hand a few times will incentivize just about anyone to run out and buy a curve tracer...

You could also use an Arduino to control the voltage supplied to the Gate, and to measure the Gate-Source voltage. Step trough the voltages in small increments, and output the results as a csv-file that you can open in Excel and make graphs out of. Basically do the same as a CurveTracer do, just a lot cheaper.