My father used to work as an electrician for more than 40 years – perhaps he would cry if he could read what i am writing here. Anyway – in many of my projects i have to switch current that cannot be switched by the Arduino or Raspberry directly, because either the amp is too high (applies to motors for instance) or the device that i want to switch needs a higher voltage.
Until now i used a relay-switch to do this – which works very nice, i even like the often mechanical switching sound of it because it’s in fact a magnetic switch inside. But a relay is kind of big and often i thought that there must be smarter ways to switch a circuit, especially when the voltage difference is only small or the current to switch is not really high. So i stumbled upon MOSFETs, which stands for metal oxid semiconductor field-effect transistor. What a cool name!
From what i read i got the feeling that these guys could also be used to fulfill my needs – so i ordered a few for less than 1 EUR each at my distributor, and today they arrived. And what shell i say – it works!
Besides the cool name and my excitement that i got it working as expected – this really adds a nice way to solve this part for some of my projects. It’s cheaper than a relay and uses less space. Let there be Mosfets!
Making connected stuff 