Orange Unit: A Person-Centered Launch
3B: Computer Building Blocks
Background Knowledge Probe
In chapter one, “Introduction to Electronic Circuits,” the background knowledge probe had you create a list of the electronics you make use of on a regular basis. As you did so, you considered who designed it, what parts might have been used inside and out to build and use it, and what you did with any items that started to work less than optimally.
- Now create a new list, this time documenting your daily-use computing devices such as laptops, tablet devices, and smartphones.
- What external and internal electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, switches, sensors, LEDs, copper wires, pins and clips, integrated circuits, and printed circuit boards, come to mind as you think about your computing devices?
- What design choices and design objectives might have inspired the layout of the system and the various circuitry, mechanics, and artistry of its layout function, look, and feel?
- What have you done with any components that started to work less than optimally?
Technical Introduction
- Explore the hardware building blocks that make up all computers.
- Examine the operating system building blocks that provide the major software package that supports the basic functions of a computer and other computing devices.
Computer Hardware Building Blocks
Electronic components like resistors, switches, LEDs, variable resistors, capacitors, other diodes, photocells, transistors, and integrated circuits combine to create many of the everyday devices around us. These can be prototyped using , ultimately leading to the creation of printed circuit boards. All computers are initially made using these prototyping tools as they evolve from innovation and design, to testing, to production and marketing, and distribution.
Inside the case of every computer, we will find one or more printed circuit boards. The is the main board connecting computer parts. It brings together the many different electronic components we have studied, as well as the connectors, sockets, and ports that provide internal and external connections to other electronics.
All computers are made up of the same basic building blocks. In addition to the motherboard, there are several key parts of a computer’s hardware:
- The the core integrated circuit controlling and executing operations.
- , the integrated circuits that temporarily hold data until needed by the CPU or other processors.
- , which includes devices like hard drives, optical media such as DVDs, solid state drives, and flash drives even when power is turned off, but that cannot share data fast enough to work directly with processors.
- , the crossing guards that control the flow of data from inputs to processors, and from processors to outputs.
- that you connect to the computer using Universal Serial Bus, or port, port, jack, audio jack, and others, such as the Raspberry Pi port.
Integrated Circuits
Processors: D