It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog so I wanted to post an update about a project me and my friend Dylan have been working on. It’s called Resistro. It is a resistor colour code calculator built in React.
Motive
As ECE students at the U of W, we had bi-weekly labs which required us to wire up a couple different configurations to explore different concepts in electronic circuits. In our ECE242 labs we focused on amplifiers. From differential to multistage amps - a lot of different resistors were used. In these labs, the hardest part about putting the circuits together was not determining the correct component values, or even actually connecting the circuit. The hardest part was finding the right resistor in the huge pile of components we were given during first year. Unless you were organized like my roommate who had each resistor labelled, finding the correct one was a slow and boring task.
Since we didn’t have the resistor colour codes memorized, we often searched online for the corresponding colours. We realized that there were no simple, user-friendly resistor colour code apps on the first page of google. Our process could be shortened if there were a quick, intuitive webapp which could return the resistor colour code when given a value and vice versa. So we got to work…
Resistro
The app itself is simple, it has an interactive resistor and a small textbox for text input.
Some features and functionality:
- Colour picker: click on a colour band to change its colour through a small colour picker
- SI prefix: support for kilo, mega, and giga ohm prefixes (I’ve never actually seen a giga-resistor though)
- Decimal resistor: support for decimal resistors
- Tolerance: The tolerance of the resistor can also be set by clicking on the percentage on the right of the resistor.
Currently Resistro only supports four band resistors, but we will consider five/six bands in the future.
Open source
We recently made Resistro open source on github so other may view, share, and contribute ideas and code to it. If you are looking to help, don’t be afraid to contact me about anything regarding the project.
What’s next
In the future, I’d like to move toward making Resistro the go-to resistor colour code app on the web. From students to hobbyists, I hope Resistro can make someone’s resistor search just a bit more tolerable.
Thanks for reading and have a great holiday season.
thomas