DIY Resistor helper

Neat resistor value helper

I love low-tec solutions to hi-tec issues! Very nice.

I am going to make this one out of thin plywood.

I have a card like that! It’s very old though and might need a replacement.

I have one like that that I bought from Radio Shack about 20 years ago. I just tried to find them on their website, looks like they no longer sell them :frowning:

I did a quick Bing search and found another style of decoder wheel set too: http://www.robives.com/blog/resistor_colour_wheel

My electronics instructor was a retired Navy instructor. He taught us the colors code this way, he apologized before hand as the language might offend some, but he assured us that we would never forget it…

Bad, Boys, Rape, Our, Young, Girls, But, Violet, Gives, Willingly, (Get, Some, Now)

The first letter of each word of course is the first letter of the color in ascending value.

Black-0, Brown-1, Red-2, Orange-3, Yellow-4, Green-5, Blue-6, Violet-7, Grey-8, White-9, (Gold-5%, Silver-10%, None-20%)

Jeff_Birt

Thanks for sharing. That one is much cooler and easier to make!

Edit: there must be a better way to memorize it. :o

Our Dutch teacher learned us a sentence to memorise the first letters of each color and I still have it in my head (and that was 16 years ago) :slight_smile:

“Zij BRengt ROzen Op GEErts GRaf Bij Vuil GRIJS Weder”

In fact, if you practice color to number conversion enough, you will no longer see colors on the resistor but you will directly see ‘numbers’. So go practice :slight_smile:

[quote]Brown-0, Black-1, Red-2, Orange-3, Yellow-4, Green-5, Blue-6, Violet-7, Grey-8, White-9, (Gold-5%, Silver-10%, None-20%)
[/quote]
Black = 0, Brown = 1 !

This is my way to memorize :
1st : Colours are getting lighter from Black to White : black, brown, red
2nd : From red to violet like the rainbow
3rd : grey, white

ant the rest is just practice, practice, practice… :slight_smile:

Is it me or is Jeffs way easier to memorise despite the topic within??

Amazing timing. We are talking about it here and this showed up in my RSS feed:

[quote]Is it me or is Jeffs way easier to memorise despite the topic within??
[/quote]

It is you :slight_smile:

Jeff and Wouter way depends on words… in their own language.

Architects and my way depends on pictures.

Different people, different solutions.

@ Lutz: Yep I swapped the position of brown and black in my description, that is now fixed. thanks for catching that.

It is interesting how different types of mnumonics work with different people.

I can still remmeber one from school like the name Roy G. Biv for the colors of the rainbow

or “Some Old Hippies Caught Another Hippey Tripping On Acid” for the basic trig functions (Sin = O/H, Cos = A/H, Tan = O/A)

and a few more from my electronics teacher: “ELI the ICE man”, for "voltage(E) leads current(I) in an inductive(L) circuit and Current(I) leads Voltage(E) in a Capacitive(C) circuit. Ohms law of course “E=IR” pronounced as ‘ear’ and "P=IE’ pronounced as 'pie. Of course now that voltage is given the symbol of ‘V’ in most places these last two don’t make as much sense as when voltage was ‘E’ (ElectroMotive Force, or EMF).

This whole thread got me to look more for the ways to memorize resistor color codes. Found this instructable.

Awesome project. Will have to file this one away for future use…