Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [wire]

A length of conductive material used as a conductor of electricity.

A wire may consist of one or more strands of conductive material (often copper, but also aluminum, silver, gold, etc.) woven or twisted together to conduct electricity. May also have a dielectric insulator.

Sometimes erroneously referred to as a "cable," which typically consists of several electrically isolated wires in a shared insulator or jacket.

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What gauge of single strand wire works well with breadboards?

I bought some single strand wires hoping to prototype on the breadboards. Unfortunately it was too small to properly fit into the breadboard holes. So my question is which gauge fits well on those small holes of breadboard?
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Why would clipping a wire cause a bomb to explode?

There are a lot of movies and video games that depict defusing bombs, most of which boils down to picking the right color wire. Something like this: Now, that's a part I don't understand. simulate this circuit – Schematic created using…
yuritsuki
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Stranded vs solid wire

What are the advantages of stranded vs solid wire? what should i be using for prototyping circuits?
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Headphone wire color coding

How do I tell which wire is which if I have a copper wire, red and green coded wire? Is the unshielded copper wire ground?
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Does wire color matter in electronics?

I'm fairly new to electronics here. But I can't seem to find any clear answer anywhere on the internet. Are wires special depending on their color? Or they have all the same purpose with just colors to define them so people won't get confused? Say I…
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Standard wire colors

I am fairly new to "electrical" engineering as a hobby/ past time. I have always loved electricity and have made simple circuits since I was a little baby. I am now working on one of my first arduino projects and I started thinking about what…
Sponge Bob
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How to use a capacitive touch screen without a human hand

I'm a programmer, and I usually hang out over on stack overflow, but I have a electricity question. I'm trying to interact with an APP on my phone by indirectly touching the the screen. Modern touchscreens, as I'm sure everyone here knows are…
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Why are high impedance circuits more sensitive to noise?

Why are high impedance circuits being more sensitive to the noise? They have less current flowing through them, but how is that related to noise, since external noise becomes voltage on the wires, and then current proportional to resistance?
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Wire broke off and stuck in a header

I'm working with an Arduino, and one of the stripped portions of the wire broke off at some point and managed to get pretty wedged into the 5V pin slot. Obviously, this wouldn't matter as much for a GPIO pin, but I sort of need to use the +5V…
sofly
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Alternatives to SPI because of EMI

I currently make a system consisting of a plastic enclosure which contains an MCU talking to 7 ADCs using 2MHz SPI over wires about 5cm long. The problem is that I'm concerned about EMI. Everything I have read suggests that any kind of digital…
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Extra bare wire in USB cable

Whilst cutting up a USB cable for a project I noticed this extra bare wire within the insulation. Now I'm assuming the foil is shielding of some sort, but do I need to connect this bare wire to ground? Or should it be left disconnected?
Calco
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How does data travel inside a wire?

I know this is a very basic question but the answers returned by google are way too complicated for me to understand. I am not asking about modulation here. What I want to know is what exactly is carrying the data. Please let me explain my…
Sunshine
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How to remove enamel from wire?

I want to repair my computer mouse cable which has become disconnected from the PCB. The wire is insulated with enamel and I have to remove it before soldering it back onto the board. How should I remove the enamel?
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Do conductors age under reasonable electric load?

Construction steels are prone to fatigue failure - they get structurally weaker when exposed to repeated mechanical stress. Is there any similar process for conductors which makes them less usable once they conduct current for long enough? In other…
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White hairs inside a headphones cable

I have a cheap set of Phillips SHE3000 earphones with a broken wire on the plug. Since I was repairing another set of headphones, with the same problem, I bought an extra plug, just to try repairing them too. Here's my problem - inside the cable for…
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