Another tragic victim of resistor code dyslexia

[frank_p]

But remember that most fluorescents make hardly any red light.

I've putted an halogen bulb in my table lamp and although it seems better lighten, blue and green seems similar.  Brown and red can look the same too.  I think I am going to re-swith to a standard bulb.
I've seen that in some vivariums they put neon and standard bulb to make plants grow: perhaps a combination of light type can help ... (?)

[KazooMan]

Easy. Top light is RED, Bottom is GREEN! (At least it is in the US).

Well, almost always.  I recall growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, New York (Liverpool, actually - in all due respect to the Beatles) hearing the story of "Tipperary Hill".   Here's a link to a Wikipedia article on how this spot came to have the green light on the top!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipperary_Hill

[alparent]

I have a pair of these. http://www.ebay.ca/itm/DUAL-LED-Illuminated-HEADSET-magnifier-jewelers-loupe-/190566882301?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c5eabdbfd

They help a lot! (Pretty sure I got mine for like 5$ shipping included.)

[R.G.]

Riding with me while I'm driving is always an adventure, I understand,  but I can tell red lights from green lights. It's the softer, more muted shades that get confused. Worse yet (as far as resistors are concerned) I can easily confuse shades of red, more specifically dark orange and real red. I have more than once put in 47K for 4.7K and vice versa.

My Child Bride has the equivalent of perfect pitch with colors. I would laugh at this - actually, I did laugh at it when she first told me - but she can match subtle shades of color by *remembering them* from several days before. We've tested it. Once I did it with a photographic color analyzer, just to be sure it wasn't me not being able to see the differences. Like musical perfect pitch, it's as much an affliction as a gift. Slight color mismatches drive her crazy. When that happens, I explain to her that there are only seven colors - white, black, red, green...   

[~arph]

Check this out... If you're colorblind, your cell phone probably isn't

http://hackedgadgets.com/2012/03/01/identifying-resistor-values-using-iphones-camera/


Not sure if there is an android version of it..

[DougH]

Mark- those magnifying viewers are really nice, I see them every once in a while at the surplus place and have been tempted to pick one up. Between my magnifying glass and reading glasses I get by but that lighted magnifier wold be really great to have.

R.G.- I have problems with red vs orange too. And it doesn't help that the shades are inconsistent from one mfr to another. Similar to you, my wife understands hues and color tones better than I ever will. It's her artistic nature. She'll put different colors together in a way that is very beautiful that I don't understand. Then she'll explain to me why that combination works and I still don't understand...

[DavenPaget]

I have a pair of these. http://www.ebay.ca/itm/DUAL-LED-Illuminated-HEADSET-magnifier-jewelers-loupe-/190566882301?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c5eabdbfd

They help a lot! (Pretty sure I got mine for like 5$ shipping included.)

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/glasses-type-20x-magnifier-with-white-led-light-2-x-cr1620-116296
Sure they make you look like a herp derp , but they are rather useful .

[petey twofinger]

> You can tell GREEN from RED visually??? Wow. A lot of the time I can't

Where do you drive? I want to avoid all traffic-lights in your area.

Two guys in a car drive right through a red light.

"Man, you just ran that red light!" exclaimed the passenger.

"Don't worry, my brother goes through traffic lights all the time," said the driver.

They continue driving through town and then proceed to drive through another stop light.

"You just ran another stop light! You're going to get us killed!" screamed the nervous passenger.

"Don't worry, my brother does it all the time," repeated the driver.

Moments later, they approached a green light and they came to a halting stop.

"Why are you stopping?" asked the anxious passenger.

The driver turned and said, "Because my brother might be coming!"

sorry ...

[markeebee]

True story.....

About 5 years ago I had to refit part of an R&D lab after they had a fire.

Apparently, one of the engineers had dodgy eyesight and liked to have lots of light on his workpieces, so he bagged the workbench nearest the window and always used one of those backlit magnifiers.  On one of the rare sunny weekends we have in the UK, the sun's rays focussed through the magnifier on to a roll of paper towels on his desktop.........Pooooof!

That's why most of the decent ones have flip-up covers.

[alex_spaceman]

I'm colour blind which means me and my DMM were always going to become good friends. That's pretty much the only way I can be sure I know what I've got at hand. The problem for me is when it comes to 2M+ resistors, in which case a very bright light+magnifying glass or, even better, a girlfriend (mine to be precise) need to be at hand.

[Perrow]

I'm colour blind which means me and my DMM were always going to become good friends. That's pretty much the only way I can be sure I know what I've got at hand. The problem for me is when it comes to 2M+ resistors, in which case a very bright light+magnifying glass or, even better, a girlfriend (mine to be precise) need to be at hand.

My latest Tayda order had the resistors (everything actually) in marked bags. Leave them in those til you need them and pick one resistor at the time. I keep all my resistors in clear cd envelopes marked for the first two bands (10, 12, 15, ...), you could use one envelope for each value. I've thought about doing that myself, would make it very easy to see when you're running out of a certain value.

[CodeMonk]

And is it just me, sometimes I find it difficult to tell the green and blue stripes apart.
Some of these manufacturers used a VERY dark green.
But I tend to measure everything anyway.

[gritz]

I used to write the resistance on the bandoliers that hold the resistors in a strip, but even that's getting a bit hard to see these days. 

Am liking the traffic light joke btw!