[TriEmbed] Current & Voltage

Carl Nobile carl.nobile at gmail.com
Thu Jul 9 10:40:12 CDT 2015


Brian,

Okay, there three things to take into account and you forgot to mention a
big one--resistance. In order for a 5V 850mA power supply to be able to
kill you your body resistance (assuming 700 mA) would need to be 7.14 ohms.
This is practically a dead short, which your body could never be even if
soaking wet. The link below indicates that you only need 200 mA under the
proper circumstances through the heart to become horizontal. So, even under
this situation your body would need to exhibit a total resistance of 25
ohms, this would still be difficult to happen. So this is why high voltage
is so dangerous, because you need the fairly high voltage to, so to speak,
punch through your body resistance to end up with a mere 200 mA to go
through your heart.

Read this link http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/JackHsu.shtml

So, this all depends on body resistance and the voltage. The current does
the killing, but is not so important when it comes to ease of death. Check
the link below on WikaPedia it kind of explains the whole thing.

Body resistance link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock

Carl



On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Grawburg via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> I know it's always, "it's the current that will kill you, not necessarily
> the voltage", but surely there is a reasonable way to determine what the
> "killing" combination is.  I've got a book that says 700 mA could do you in
> if it finds a path through your heart.  Is this really suggesting that if I
> take the 5VDC, 850 mA power supply I use for my Raspberry Pi, hook one lead
> to my big toe and the other lead to my ear lobe I may end up dead? When we
> discuss current & voltage in my RPi class next week I'd like some more
> information to pass on.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Brian Grawburg
>
>
>
>
>
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Carl J. Nobile (Software Engineer)
carl.nobile at gmail.com
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