Collaborate Disseminate
A discussion came up on the Hackaday Discord PCB design channel about resistor networks, and it got me thinking about whether we (the hacker community) use them in designs or …read more Continue reading Too Much Over-optimization is Never Enough!
Perhaps it’s a side-effect of getting older, but it seems like reading the color bands on blue metal-film resistors is harder than it was on the old brown carbon ones. …read more Continue reading Finally, a Machine to Organize Resistors!
Decades ago, electronic components were not as easy to acquire as they are today. Sure, you could get some things at Radio Shack. But you might not have many choices, …read more Continue reading Watch Those 1% Resistors
Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: March 26, 2023
Perhaps the second most famous law in electronics after Ohm’s law is Moore’s law: the number of transistors that can be made on an integrated circuit doubles every two years …read more Continue reading Smaller is Sometimes Better: Why Electronic Components are So Tiny
One of the first things you learn in electronics is how to identify a resistor’s value. Through-hole resistors have color codes, and that’s generally where beginners begin. But why are they marked like this? Like red stop signs and yellow lines down the middle of the road, it just seems …read more
Radioactivity stirs up a lot of anxiety, partially because ionizing radiation is undetectable by any of the senses we were born with. Anytime radiation makes the news, there is a surge of people worried about their exposure levels and a lack of quick and accurate answers. Doctors are flooded with calls, detection devices become scarce, and fraudsters swoop in to make a quick buck. Recognizing the need for a better way, researchers are devising methods to measure cumulative exposure experienced by commodity surface mount resistors.
Cumulative exposure is typically tracked by wearing a dosimeter a.k.a. “radiation badge”. It is standard …read more
Continue reading A Very Different ‘Hot Or Not’ Application For Your Phone
Resistors are an odd bunch. Why would you have 1.0 Ω resistors, then a 1.1 Ω resistor, but there’s no resistors in between 4.7 Ω and 5.6 Ω? This is a question that has been asked for decades, but the answer is actually quite simple. Resistors are manufactured according to their tolerance, not their value. By putting twenty four steps on a logarithmic scale, you get values that, when you take into account the tolerance of each resistor, covers all possible values. Need a 5.0 Ω resistor? Take a meter to some 4.7 Ω and 5.6 Ω resistors. You’ll find …read more
Continue reading The Printed Solution To A Handful Of Resistors
There is a looming spectre of doom hovering over the world of electronics manufacturing. It’s getting hard to find parts, and the parts you can find are expensive. No, it doesn’t have anything to with the tariffs enacted by the United States against Chinese goods this last summer. This is a problem that doesn’t have an easy scapegoat. This is a problem that strikes at the heart of any economic system. This is the capacitor and resistor shortage.
When we first reported on the possibility of a global shortage of chip capacitors and resistors, things were for the time being, …read more
Continue reading Ask Hackaday: How’s That Capacitor Shortage Going?
One of the first things anyone with an interest in electronics learns is the resistor colour code. The colour of the first band reveals the first figure, the second the subsequent figure, and the third a power-of-ten multiplier. At first you learn these colours, but eventually you just recognise the values through familiarity. You don’t have to think about multipliers when you see orange-orange-red, you just know that it’s a 3K3 resistor.
[Plusea] has come up with an entertaining interface for an ohmmeter, which instead of displaying the resistance on an LCD or a meter shows it as the colours …read more