So while looking through my grand fathers tool boxes in his garage for pliers i found two baby food jars full of different sized capacitors. They seem to be silicon not disk like at all and a variety of sizes(really small to normalishh??) so my question is do i need a meter to find out what they are or do i look for numbers on the actual caps? From the looks of them id think they weere .1uf and up but i dont know enough to trust my 2 cents.
You can tell from the numbers on the caps.
If there are just 2 numbers, like "10", or "22", then that is the number of picofarads.
If there are 3 numbers, then it works like a resistor. The first 2 numbers are the significant numbers, and the third number is the number of 0's to add. So, a "104" is a 1, a 0, and 4 0's, so: 1 0 0000. That's 100,000pF, or 100nF, or 0.1uF. A "223" is 2 2 000, or 22000pf, or 22nF, or 0.022uF.
If there is a letter, that is the accuracy, or tolerance of the capacitor.
B +/- 0.10pF
C +/- 0.25pF
D +/- 0.5pF
E +/- 0.5%
F +/- 1%
G +/- 2%
H +/- 3%
J +/- 5%
K +/- 10%
M +/- 20%
N +/- 30%
P +100% ,-0%
Z +80%, -20%
ODDUINO:
So while looking through my grand fathers tool boxes in his garage for pliers i found two baby food jars full of different sized capacitors. They seem to be silicon not disk like at all and a variety of sizes(really small to normalishh??) so my question is do i need a meter to find out what they are or do i look for numbers on the actual caps? From the looks of them id think they weere .1uf and up but i dont know enough to trust my 2 cents.
A picture is worth a thousand words - how do you even know that are capacitors? "seem to be silicon" - what do you mean by that?
If they are tantalum or electrolytic they will have the value explicitly printed on them.
I have never heard of silicon capacitors (other than inside ICs or MOSFETs where you have two plates of semiconductor to make a capacitor).
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