Kinda looking for input from interested individuals.
A couple of days back I posted on another Bar Sport thread asking about organizing my resistor part drawers, soliciting for ideas. Some were intriguing enough that I decided to try my hand at a usable and useful selection of resistors. My goal was to get them to fit in as few drawers as possible in one of these:
...since that is what I am sorting them into for my bench, while have a useful selection of values. Six (6) drawers wide by ten (10) tall. This is what I came up with for a "system":
Essentially, these values would fill the top two rows, since each drawer can be split in half with a divider - my selection would fill two rows. Each drawer hold two values, smallest value in the near partition, next size up in the far partition.
I figure I could purchase what I don't have in my current selection (which is quite big, actually, but probably not completely of those values listed) from here:
If you bought 100 of each value, you would only have to spend $72.00 US (sans tax & s+h) to fully stock the 12 drawers.
I would probably check out Apache Reclamation here locally first, though.
What do you think of the selection? Is it useful for most prototyping projects? Is there anything you would change, add, or subtract?
If you're doing a lot of projects with LEDs, I'd dedicate a row to "R x 10" to have more values handy for current limiting resistors.
But I've never been all that fond of drawer cabinets for electronic parts. For resistors, I use some of those sandwich-sized imitation Tupperware containers, with resistor values separated into 2x3 inch ziplocs. That lets me easily bring just the ranges of values I need to the workbench for soldering, and almost eliminates the risk of spillage.
Plus it spares me the ordeal of picking a subset of standard values to fit a limited number of drawers/compartments ;D
I like the idea. You could do it in fewer drawers or double the selection by having two values per compartment, since if there's only two it'll be a quick and easy to find the one you want.
I'd add something in the M range (like 1 M) to play with capacitive sensing.
Coding Badly: That's not a bad idea, if you need it; for my purposes (robotics development mainly) I couldn't see a need for such large values. If anyone feels I am wrong here, I could certainly add a third row.
I'd dedicate a row to "R x 10" to have more values handy for current limiting resistors.
Ran Talbott: When you say this, do you mean "10 ohms, 20 ohms, etc"? That could still take up an extra drawer, so I could have 10/100 ohms in one row, then 1K/10K in the next, then 100K/1M in the third...
So far no one has suggested a change in the values I selected overall, which I take is a good sign? I'm not adverse to expanding the number of values, but I would rather have a good "overall" selection for general purpose prototyping (once again, in the robotics area), and then if I need particular values in the course of a project that I don't have immediately on-hand (but the values I do have work "good enough" for the prototype phase), then I could purchase those specifically at that time.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions so far - keep 'em coming!
When you say this, do you mean "10 ohms, 20 ohms, etc"?
Oops. I meant resistors in the 100-999 Ohm range: e.g., I categorize "brown-red-brown" as "12 x 10", and that container is marked "R x 10".
I would have preferred to make it "10, 20, ...", but apparently the guys who invented the resistor color code were too broke to own slide rules, so they put the decimal point in the wrong place :
I think you'd be better served by baggies for the resistors you don't use very often.
Something that I didn't disclose is that I don't have just one of the 60 drawer cabinets; I have two of them. Plus four of the 30 drawer cabinets. That doesn't count the cabinets I have for physical hardware like screws, nails, etc.
Organizational space in my shop isn't the problem - really, its the system (or currently, the lack thereof) that I am facing that is problematic...
Organizational space in my shop isn't the problem - really, its the system (or currently, the lack thereof) that I am facing that is problematic...
In that case I'd suggest getting a full E-series of resistors, basically just for completeness sake.. (why stop at 56, 560, 5.6k etc? Of course there is the price point...). Being 6 drawers wide it seems to fit nicely with any E-series too, if you fit more than one value in one drawer (now I don't necessarily mean the E192 series :P)
I would maybe not have a decade difference in the same drawer though, but thats me.. hey it's your cabinet I just figure if you get the wrong one, the difference wouldn't be so much. This can probably go both ways though.. I figure they can probably sneak under the divider inside the drawer - at least mine does, so I don't use them. Also I don't have room for 2 dividers (3 partitions) in one drawer anyway, so I just put them all there (3 values pr. drawer) and rely on knowing the resistor color codes.
I don't really have any specific values for "prototyping projects" to suggest, I would think it depends on what kind of prototyping you do, digital, analog or both. Analog really covers a lot. Digital it is perhaps enough with a very few standard values like 1k, 10k and some LED resistors..
But to throw out a suggestion anyway, how about the E12 series? Two values pr. drawer, 4 rows for the 100 - 1M range
raron - thank you for posting that! I had once come across the nomenclature of "E-series" - but I couldn't remember it when I started thinking about all of this, which is what I was trying to go for in my layout.
Price will enter into it, depending on what I have vs what I don't have (vs what I don't need - those will probably be put into baggies, then in a box on one of my shelves). I am going to study what you posted, the link you provided, and other sources (plus what I posted), but I think what you posted it really close.
I can possibly go more rows on my cabinet; and since these need to be close at hand they can go into one of my 10 row cabinets (instead of my fivers), which will still leave plenty of room for other components.
Mainly, I will be prototyping digital/microcontroller circuits for robotics. There may be occasional forays into analog stuff (perhaps for things like ultrasonic transducers, and other analog measurement needs - but not likely anything like major audio stuff or RF); for instance, my main capacitor selection has been some 47uF electrolytics, some 22-33uF caps for crystals (got a bunch of 16 MHz crystals), and some 100nF caps for filtering. I also have a variety of diodes and other semiconductors (transistors, FETs, various TTL logic and other such ICs).
