Dzekwer Explains

I’ve never seen how important documenting projects on GitHub is until I had this email.

A few days ago, I received an email from a brand based in China complimenting me on an Arduino Uno R3 schematic design in KiCad that I had uploaded to my GitHub.

To be honest, I was surprised. I never expected anyone to notice that project.

But that email made me realize something:

Your GitHub can be more than just a place to store your projects. It can become your engineering portfolio.

As engineering students, we work on so many projects, simulations, designs, and experiments. Sometimes we finish them, submit them, and move on without documenting what we actually built.

But you never know who might come across your work or what opportunity it could lead to.

So, to every engineering student:

Document your projects. Build your portfolio. Share your journey.

Take pictures. Upload your designs. Document your challenges and what you learned.

You never know when the better opportunity will find you through something you once decided to put online.

What do engineers really mean when they say:

“There is a voltage drop across the wire”?

Does the wire simply eat up some of the voltage? 😅

Not exactly.

Think about voltage as the push that drives electric charge through a circuit.

As current flows through a wire, the wire has some resistance.

Because of that resistance, maintaining the current flow requires some of the electrical energy to be transferred into the wire as heat.

The result?

The voltage you measure at one end of the wire can be lower than the voltage at the other end.

That difference is called voltage drop.

Here’s an example:

A battery provides 12 V.

Current flows through a long wire.

You measure only 11.5 V at the load.

That 0.5 V difference is the voltage drop across the wire.

And here’s the important part:

Voltage isn’t simply being “lost.”

The electrical energy associated with that drop is being transferred, mainly as heat, because of the resistance of the wire.

That’s why engineers care about voltage drop.

Too much voltage drop can cause:

• Lights to become dim
• Motors to perform poorly
• Equipment to malfunction

So, in simple terms:

Voltage drop = the difference in voltage between two points caused by current flowing through resistance or impedance.