ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the right way to combine commercial electronics instruments and to use them, since these are the skills most needed for research. Much of this depends on a very deep understanding of resistors and capacitors. Students have encountered these before, but may not yet have the intuitive understanding they need to really be proficient with research level instruments. Loading occurs to some extent whenever any two circuits are connected together. The key concepts for understanding loading are input and output impedance. A “model” mimics most of the important behavior of the real object, but is much easier to understand. The purpose of a battery is to maintain a voltage difference between its two terminals. For example, an ideal D battery is supposed to maintain a voltage difference of exactly 1.5 V between its two terminals, no matter how much current it has to supply.
