How do electronic things work?

Electronic thing work on a base of electric current (think of it like water) that flows through the elements of the circuit that change whats happening to it.

Basic elements?

Resistor

Resistor is most basic kind of a component it makes the current flow controled, think of it as of a valvue that controls how much water can flow through. If it is not made for the amount of current trying to push through though it will start getting hotter and hotter turning ecces current into heat and effectively slowly burning itself up. Resistors are in almost anything that uses DC (direct current) and in some things that use AC (alternating current) but thats rarer from my expirience.

Capacitor

Capacitor is an element that keeps charge and is able to discharge into the circuit fully in a very short period of time giving very high current at once. They allow for circuits such as filters and help with making DC more stable in most power supply cases. They are in almost every complicated circuit, and most less complicated ones. In DC we have to use capacitors made specifically for it as normal ones are a open circuit in the case of DC. In ac they shift phase -90 degrees.

Coil

Coils are electrical elements mostly seen in AC or Transmitter circuits. They create induction. What's that? In the most basic terms think of it as a resistor specifically made for AC which makes the element also resonate with diffrent frequencies. Coils can be good reciver antenas they were used in cristal radios because of their ability to resonate with lower frequenies while having a small form factor. They may also create a magnetic field and shift phase 90 degrees.

Transistor

About this element there is alot to say so we will start with describing what was before it. Before transistors there were electron lamps. How did they work? They worked by having elecrodes in a bulb filled with vacum that moved elctrically. Making them work simmilary to a modern transistor but in a bigger and more heat creating form. Transistor work by having a collector, emiter and base instead of moving electrodes. The small current on the base makes the current between emiter and collector stronger or higer.

Transfomer

Transformers are electricall element made by two coils and a core made from a ferromagnetic material It uses properties of coils and diffrence in the amount of rings on the coils to amplify voltage. This means if we put 12 volts of power on one side of a 1:4 transformer on the output we will have 48 volts. Thanks to that they are very often used if a circuit does not need to be compact or light.

IC chips and logic gates

IC chips are elements of more modernly used electronics, they are silicon chips with elements in them, one of the most popular chips is NE555 which is a 555khz clock like chip, with a weird thing about it being that it is made without any transistors, as for logic gares they change voltage base on the inputs that they are given. Voltage changes represent 1's and 0's. You can think of them like small single task cpu's.