- There's two kinds of ideal
sources we're gonna talk about. One is an ideal voltage source, and the other is an ideal current source. A ideal voltage source, the symbol is, looks like a circle like that. We put a voltage indication
right inside there and that's called V. And this is a constant voltage, what I've shown here
is a constant voltage. And that come from a power supply or it could come from a battery. When it comes from a battery, we have a special symbol for that, the battery symbol looks like this and the convention for
this, we also label it V. The convention for the
polarity of a battery symbol is the long line there
is the plus terminal and the short line right there, that guy is the minus terminal. So that's the convention for a battery. The other type of ideal source
is called a current source and it also has a symbol with a circle and this one we put an arrow and it goes in the
direction of the current. The current symbol is I. It can look like that or we could point the arrow
the other way, like that, depending on how the application goes. And that's an ideal current source. And those are the two
symbols for constant current. One of the things we can do, we can plot these, we can plot
theses two voltage sources, the voltage source and the current source. We can plot them on a curve that has coordinates
as voltage and current. So this would be called an IV curve or an IV plot that we're about to do here. For a constant voltage source, the voltage doesn't change. The current goes up and down, depending on what the rest
of the circuit demands, but the voltage is the same everywhere, so it plots something like this. That would be the IV plot
of a constant voltage, where V equals some constant V. And if we wanna plot our
constant current source on this kind of IV plot,
this would be something where the current is always the same, the current is the same,
independent of the voltage. And so a plot of that for a positive current
would look like this and we would say something
like I equals a constant I. So that's the IV plot of a current source and the IV plot of a voltage source. Alright, these are the two basic ways we deliver power or signals into circuits. Now we have a complete set of elements that we can build things with.