My dad and I were testing a circuit we’d made to control the solenoid valve(the thing we’re going to use to drop water), but we couldn’t get it to work. At first, we couldn’t figure out what was causing the circuit to fail, but we eventually smelled something burning. We figured out that we had burnt the diode, but this diode was a safety feature, and the circuit should’ve worked without the diode. My dad was thinking about this and he finally came up with the answer to our question.

My dad looked up the amount of current our NPN transistor could have flow through it. He said it could have 200 milliamps flow through it. Now, you have to understand, one amp is a lot of current. In our circuit, we had 1 amp, 1000 milliamps, flowing through our transistor. All that current burnt our transistor. Without the transistor, our circuit couldn’t work.

We’re still not entirely sure how we’re going to fix this problem, but when we do, I’ll write about it.