Standard Resistor Teardowns

March 19, 2016 by Jenny List 20 Comments

What do you do, when you want an ohm? What is an ohm, for that matter? Take a wander over to the textbook definitions, and you’re soon deep in a world of coulombs and parallel infinite planes one meter apart in a vacuum that you probably only half remember from your high school physics class. It’s hard work, this metrology lark.

Of course, you can just order a resistor. A few cents each when you’re buying small quantities or much less when you’re buying a reel of five thousand, and there you have it. An ohm. Only it’s not really an ohm, more like nearly an ohm. Within 1% of an ohm is pretty good, but Vishay or Bourns or whoever don’t have the margins to get philosophical about those infinite planes when you’re only giving them a few cents.

When you REALLY want an ohm, you buy a standard resistor, and you pay a more significant sum. You’re never going to wire one of these up to bias a transistor or drive an LED, instead it’s about as close as it’s possible to get on your bench to the value it says on the box and you can use it for calibration purposes. PPM figures well in excess of the resolution of even superior DMMs sound pretty good to us!

[Zlymex] was curious about standard resistors, so performed a teardown of a few to see what they contain. And after a pithy explanation of the terms involved he’s managed to look inside quite a few of them.

Inside he finds hermetically sealed wire-wound resistors, some oil-filled wire-wound resistors, and the occasional hefty piece of manganin. He also tears down some of the hermetically sealed resistors themselves, finding both wire-wound and foil resistance elements within.

It is a curious obsession that permeates hacker culture, that of standard measurements, and it’s one we’ve covered quite a few times here. Time enthusiasts with atomic clocks like this rather beautiful discrete logic build, or voltage enthusiasts with their temperature compensated references or programmable standards. Surprisingly though, this appears to be the first time we’ve looked at standard resistors.

Thanks [David Gustafik] for the tip.

How Biohackers Are Fighting A Two-front War On Antibiotic Resistance

September 8, 2015 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

We humans like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution on the planet, but that’s just a conceit. It takes humans roughly twenty years to reproduce, whereas some bacteria can make copies of themselves every 20 minutes. Countless generations of bacteria have honed and perfected their genomes into extremely evolved biological machines.

Most bacteria are harmless, and some are quite useful, even tasty – witness the lactofermented pickles and sauerkraut I made this summer. But some bacteria are pathogenic nightmares that have swarmed over the planet and caused untold misery and billions of deaths. For most of human history it has been so – the bugs were winning. Then a bright period dawned in the early 20th century – the Era of Antibiotics. At last we were delivered from the threat of pestilence, never more to suffer from plague and disease like our unfortunate ancestors. Infections were miraculously cured with a simple injection or pill, childhood diseases were no longer reaping their tragic harvest, and soldiers on the battlefield were surviving wounds that would have festered and led to a slow, painful death.

Now it seems like this bright spot of relief from bacterial disease might be drawing to an end. Resistant strains of bacteria are in the news these days, and the rise of superbugs seems inevitable. But is it? Have we run out of tools to fight back? Not quite yet as it turns out. But there’s a lot of work to do to make sure we win this battle.

Continue reading “How Biohackers Are Fighting A Two-front War On Antibiotic Resistance” →

Digital Decade Resistance Box On The Cheap

September 28, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

[Stynus] has finished a unique decade resistance box which doesn’t use conventional rotary switches to select the appropriate resistors. These switches are old fashioned and expensive, so [Stynus] built this decade resistance box that uses a microcontroller and a series of relays to switch the resistors.

Simply selecting a resistance on the screen tells the microcontrollers which resistors need to be switched in order to provide the proper resistance. The box uses relays to do switching instead of transistors because the transistors don’t handle high frequency AC as well as the relays. The device is powered by an 18V transformer and rectifier and, as a bonus, [Stynus] got all of his parts on the cheap which made this a great solution to the expensive resistance decade box problem.

This is a very well-polished piece of test equipment. We’ve featured other decade resistance boxes but never one that was controlled by a microcontroller. All of the PCB layouts and the code for microcontroller are available on the project site if you have a desire to make your own.

Measuring 185 µΩ In Circuit

January 27, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

meter

To measure resistance, you usually have to take the resistor to be tested out of the circuit, and sometimes that’s impossible. If you’re using a multimeter, measuring very small resistances is difficult to say the least. Combine both these problems – measuring microOhms in-circuit – and you have a problem that’s perfectly suited for the Mooshimeter.

Announced just a few weeks ago, the Mooshimeter is a two-channel multimeter that communicates with your cell phone over Bluetooth. It’s perfect for measuring current and voltage simultaneously, all while being tucked away in some place that’s either dangerous, inaccessible, or mobile.

The Mooshimeter team put together a great example of what can be done with their meter by measuring the resistance of a car battery grounding strap while behind the steering wheel. To do this, they put alligator clips across the grounding cable and clamped on a current meter.

Inside the car, they whipped out their cell phone and looked at the Mooshimeter’s output for the voltage and current measurement. The Mooshi app has an IV curve (with linear regression in the works), so simply dividing the current and voltage gives them the resistance of the battery’s grounding cable.

It’s a very cool and extremely simple demonstration of how cool the Mooshimeter actually is. Video of the demo below.

Continue reading “Measuring 185 µΩ In Circuit” →

Resistance Decade Box Using DIP Switches

July 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

resistance-decade-box

Here’s a simple piece of equipment which you’ll be proud to display on your electronics bench. It’s a resistance decade box. The concept has been around forever — it offers the ability to tune a wide range of resistance values just by adjusting the controls. We especially like the clean look of this one, and think the use of DIP switches is a nice touch.

Check out the toggle switch at the top. It lets you disconnect the resistance values from the output in order to test them with your meter. It may not seem like much, but fudging your switch settings could end up smoking your target project. The value of that feature isn’t lost on us.

The DIP switches are mounted to some Radio Shack breakout boards which work perfectly for hosting the resistors as well. This keeps the inside of the enclosure nice and tidy. The final touch is the printed face plate applied to the cover of the box.

Like we’ve said, this one is nice but our favorite is still this one that uses thumbwheel switches to dial in a value.

Giant Resistor-shaped Ohmmeter

February 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

resistance-measuring-resistor

The fun of having a giant resistor-shaped Ohmmeter is that it reads back the resistance by displaying the color code. If you’re not too hot with decoding those bands there’s a helper band to the right which will display the value numerically.

All of the electronics are housed in the opaque part of the resistor, making for a nice low-profile base. The bent leads are hollow and allow [Sebastian] and his friend to run power and measurement leads through to the power connector on the back and the pair of banana jacks near the front. Each translucent ring houses an RGB LED, except for the one on the right which has four 7-segment display modules embedded in it. An ATmega168 takes the measurements using its Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) to read the value from a voltage divider. You can see a quick demo of the Ohmmeter in the video after the jump.

This would be a fun thing to pair with that giant breadboard.

Continue reading “Giant Resistor-shaped Ohmmeter” →

LiPo Internal Resistance Measurement Tool

December 12, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

lipo-internal-resistance-meter

This is a scratch-build meter for measuring the internal resistance of Lithium Polymer cells. [Bleuer Csaba] uses the LiPo cells for RC vehicles and thet take quite a beating from the motors they’re supplying. This means that he only gets about 100-200 cycles out of each cell. To figure out where one is in its life cycle you can measure the internal resistance where a rising resistance indicates greater age. [Bleuer] mentions that you can buy a meter to do this for you, but what fun is that?

Since he’s rolling his own tool he defined his own parameters for the readings. After experimenting with different loads driven for different test periods he was able to extrapolate an equation that estimates the resistance measurement. As you can see in the clip after the break, this happens very fast. All he has to do is connect the cell and press one button. The measurements are made and various data points are displayed on the quartet of 7-segment displays.

Continue reading “LiPo Internal Resistance Measurement Tool” →