In question video I asked you what thing A and thing B is. Today’s answer (answer video) will provide you basic info but if you want even more info, check the Resources.
A wire is a single conductor that is tipically made of copper, aluminium or sometimes steel (steel is not for electrical use). Wire can be with or without the jacket/isolation which is colored for easyer use and non-conductive. We know solid and stranded conductor types where stranded conductor is more flexible handling less power and lower frequency than one solid conductor of the same cross-section diameter but both are comparable weight. Longer the conductor is, higher is the resistance and also has more power/signal loss.
Solid wire has one single long stiff bendable conductor strand and may be wraped with apropriate jacket/isolation.
Stranded wire cointains multiple very thin solid conductor strands twisted or braided together into a single conductor. Most conductors are wraped with the appropriate jacket/isolation keeping the conductors form.
The world has multiple wire size gauge standards and represented with numbers assigning diameter or cross-sectionall surface area of a counduit. Some wire gauge standards:
American Wire Gauge (AWG) uses imperial mesurment system in inches.
Standard Wire Gauge (SWG) uses metric mesurment system in mm.
IEC 60228 the International Electrotechnical Commission’s international standard on conductors of insulated cables uses metric wire size standard and it is used in most parts of the world. Among other things, it defines a set of standard wire cross-sectional surface area sizes in mm^2 like in my country Slovenia.
Weird thing is that when gauge number increases, diameter size decreases. Check the Resources for more info and wire types.
Cable contains two or more wires where wires are wraped or bonded together in some way. For example classical home electrical extension cord has 3 colored wires:
Hot wire for current,
neutral wire to conclude hot wire loop and
grounding wire.
For example in my country Slovenia hot wire is brown, neutral is blue and ground is yellow with green stripe but colors are not the same everywhere. In some cases hot wire can be black. In 3 phase 5 wire cable you have usually brown, black and gray wire for the individual phase.
Few cable types:
Twisted pair cable has two wires wisted together where inside one cable you can find one to several twisted pairs inside one cable and it is often used in telecomunication industries, computer network stations, theaters, etc.
For example UTP network cable have 4 twisted pairs and that means 8 wires. 2 wires can be used for up to 10Mbps speeds, 4 wires for up to 100Mbps and 8 wires for 1000Mbps or 1Gbps and higher
Mbps = Megabits per second
Gbps = Gigabits per second
Coaxial cable has one solid metal conductor in the middle encased with dialectric isolation, surrounded with braided wire shield encased in a tough outer jacket. They can carry different signals like for cable television, networking, also connecting antenna with transmitter/reciver boards and more with low losses.
Coaxial cable were also used to transfer data between the computers/devices before UTP network cable. Because of only 2 conductors maximum transfer speed was 10Mbps (Mbps = Megabits per second).
Multi-conductor cable can have 2 to 60 conductors where each conductor is encased in jacket that can be solid or/and stranded. These cables are used to connect computer, audio system and other devices.
Fiber-optic cable uses thin glass or plastic fibre optic conductor instead of traditional metal conductors that can carry more information and faster than metal counterparts but they can not transmit electrical power and they are not very bendable.
(Basic optic cable example)
Basic fiber-optic cable has 2 wires where one is to send and second one to recive the data. By bending the cable signal strenth loss and permannent micro cracks can appear and if bended too much conduit will break. So wide bends for the win :D.
Ribbon cable has multiple conductors connected side-by-side with non-conductive isolation. Some of them are called zip-wire because the individual conductors can be seperated from the ribbon.
Some ribbon cables you can seperate individual wires by hand.
