Right now I’m sorting all my resistors into plastic bags, and it’s kind of a lengthy process! Anthony Clay wrote a program called EESPeak that speaks the numeric value when you describe the colors. Have you ever had a giant pile of loose resistors to organize? I have! Instead of slowly calculating every single part […]
The fundamentals of switching in GIF format! See a 5V micro relay switch from normally-closed to normally-open and back to normally-closed.
Complete with nerdtastic puns, both homonymic and typographical. You may have already guessed that Becky Stern would be the culprit. The pattern and detailed instructions are available for free.
Speaking from experience, I’ve gone through the madness of sorting hundreds of resistors. Even if you have sharp vision and good color discrimination, it’s a challenging chore. Rich Olson of Nothing Labs coded an Iphone app that allows you to simply take a picture of the resistor, drag bar shaped indicators onto the resistor, and receive the ohm value and tolerance of the resistor.
Ever have an application where you needed resistors with accurate values, but couldn’t find any in your pile of cheap ones that had exactly the value was marked on them?
Alan Parekh of Winnipeg makes these cool component-symbol coasters from 1/4″ plywood, sealed with polyurethane varnish. Ten dollars gets a set of six: resistor R1, inductor L2, LED D3, capacitor C4, transistor Q5, and ground GND. Good-looking, clever, and easy on the wallet.
Dave Fowler, of uC Hobby, sent us a link to this java app for determining resistor code values. There are a lot of these resistor ID tools floating around, in different formats — it’s nice to have the option to use which one works best for you and your circumstances (for instance, I don’t have […]
