Papercraft gadget to help you figure out the value of resistors

201204260945
If you don't want to rely on an obscene/racist mnemonic to help you figure out the value of resistors based on their colored bands, you can make this nifty papercraft resistor decoder from Adafruit.

It’s the newest tool in our Circuit Playground -- when you can’t get to your iPhone or iPad, use paper! One side helps you read 4-band types and the other side takes care of 5-band types. The Resistor Helper is on Thingiverse as a PDF (with Illustrator editability preserved). Designed by Adafruit with Matthew Borgatti.

Resistor Helper – Papercraft Resistor Calculator

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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coop

Or you could, you know, just memorise the colours and their numbers. Not all that hard, really.
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  I have tried to memorize them, but my brain is not as good as yours. Don’t you think people who have a hard time memorizing the color codes should have aids to help them?
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Daniel-D-Lindmark/1486655461 Daniel D Lindmark
  
  Or you could use surface mount resistors. You know, where they write the value on the side.
http://redubllc.com tmonkey

Racist mnemonic? Now I’m curious…
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  Yeah, I never learned that one.
  
  Personally, I remember them as
  
  (dark colors) (rainbow) (light colors)
  - Ultan
    
    That’s pretty much how I taught it. I also think of black/brown as “infrared” and grey/white as “ultraviolet”. This papercraft computer would have been a big help.
    Keeping the resistor boxes sorted and labeled is also a big help, but most of all, each student should have his or her own decent multimeter to verify resistances and capacitances.
    (as well as take-home component sets, solderless breadboards, and Forrest Mims books.)
    - http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
      
      Ditto on the rainbow spectrum.
      
      Like someone else mentioned, when surface-mount came out the resistors simply had the numbers on them (which brought the new issue of needing magnification to look at a resisitor).
- oasisob1
  
  I’ve no clue either. We used the ‘sexeh’ one.
Anthony Peone

Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly? I’m old and could give a shit about racism sexism or political correctness!
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  That doesn’t include the racist part. I’ll let you figure it out.
  - TooGoodToCheck
    
    I didn’t so much figure it out as look it up on Wikipedia. It’s impressive as a mnemonic device, because that shit is so vile that after a single reading it is now burned in to my brain.
  - voidPortal
    
    I learned it as Black Boys… back in the 80s
Karl J. Smith

Better Be Right Or Your Great Big Venture Goes Wrong is what I learned in middle school…
http://www.facebook.com/clesoine Charlie Lesoine

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Roy Trumbull

Don’t know how it is in the rest of the country but electronics programs have been disappearing from community colleges in northern CA. . However, the kinds of classes I refer to as young adult daycare continue to multiply.
- swishercutter
  
  The program I attended in the 90′s is no longer available at my local college. The instructor said he used to have many companies scouting our program every year, then it all went overseas. We used to have 5 or 6 big name companies within a 50 mile area now there are maybe 2. (My instructor blames NAFTA, I know very little about it)
  
  It’s a shame, the good programs fall off and ITT tech is still going strong for 5 times the price. Then again, it was a hard program that typically lost 75% of the students by the end of second year. We had 30hrs a week of lab/theory not counting the math/english classes.
  
  BTW, we just learned the sexist part of the mnemonic (like anthony peone) we skipped the racist part.
  - http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
    
    If I knew where to get a soldering job around here (D.C.) I’d probably take it, pay cut and all. When I lived in Austin I always figured I could go back to soldering. No stress to take home. But, yeah, pay was low (when and where I did it).
    
    This was at IBM, which I am not sure actually produces physical objects anymore (they certainly don’t in Austin, not for 12 or 13 years).
http://www.risedream.com/blog/ Usman Khan

Well this seems a nice simple yet handy project. Yes sometimes we need to apply school physics to accomplish everyday tasks
ciaran57

I find an associative system much easier – for a start, you don’t need to go all the way through the mneumonic to get to the last few numbers. I made this for my students: http://imgur.com/WWI9V
They learn the code in just a few minutes. Go over it a few times over the next couple of days, and it sticks.
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  This is cool! What is the part about 7? I can’t read it.
  - ciaran57
    
    Was stretching it for this one. I always put a line through my 7s, so I picture the line as a knife, and associate it as violent/violet.
    Let me know if you can think of a better one (though the main point is it that works)
    - Mark_Frauenfelder
      
      Now that you explained it, it works perfectly.
Marc45

Perhaps the more interesting question to be asked is why this particular mnemonic device came into being.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Evan-Eaks/100000951600373 Evan Eaks

this still doesn’t solve my problem. i’m colorblind. :(
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  There are apps for that, including Resistor Photo ID, and Ohm Sense. I’ve never used either, but they exist.
sockdoll

Oh, that Violet!
pjcamp

Radio Shack used to give these things away.

Back when Radio Shack sold useful shit.
http://greggman.com greggman

It’s 2012!!! Print the resistance on the resistor in numbers for EFs sake! Color coding dates from a time where printing tech sucked. We’ve far surpassed that time. It’s time to move on into the 21st century.
- http://profiles.google.com/westcarleton Ray Perkins
  
  Most of my resistors in the parts bin have printed values, and they’re all at least 15 years old. My age means using a magnifier to read them, of course.
Bucket

“Big Brother Reptilian Overlords!” Yelled Glen, “Brainwashing Via Ground Water!”

I can’t believe I’m the first one to post this: http://xkcd.com/992/
Anthony Finkelstein

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