Floating ground

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a toy car that you want to make go around a track. The car needs electricity, like a battery, to move. But you can't just stick the battery onto the track, right? That would be dangerous and won't work. So you need to connect the battery to the car with wires or cables.

Now, let's talk about the ground. The ground is like the dirt or grass that you walk on outside. But in electronics, it means something else. The ground is a point in a circuit where we connect things to complete the circuit, kind of like where we plug in a light bulb to turn it on.

Sometimes, the ground is connected to the earth, like when we use a metal rod to ground an electronic device for safety reasons. This is called "earth ground" or "grounding to earth." But other times, we don't want to or can't connect to the earth. For example, in a car, the metal body of the car is used as the ground.

When the ground is not connected to the earth, we call it a "floating ground." It's like the ground is floating, not connected to anything. But it still serves an important purpose in completing the circuit.

So, going back to our toy car example, imagine that you have a battery-powered car and you want to race it on a carpet. The carpet is a great insulator, meaning it won't let electricity pass through it easily. If you connect the negative wire of the battery to the metal body of the car (which then acts as the ground), and place the car on the carpet, you might notice that it moves slower or not at all. This is because the carpet is not letting the electricity flow through the car properly.

To fix this, you can use a floating ground. Instead of connecting the negative wire of the battery to the metal body of the car, you connect it to a wire that's not touching anything else. This wire acts as the floating ground. When you put the car on the carpet, it will still move because the floating ground completes the circuit without needing to connect to the carpet.

So there you have it, kiddo! A floating ground is when we use a wire that's not connected to anything else to complete a circuit, instead of connecting to the earth or a metal body like we usually do. It's a fancy trick that lets us make things work even when we can't connect them to the ground like usual.