Thursday, April 10, 2014

Resistor Parts Drawer Organization

I've got a terrible resistor organizing scheme going on and I want to fix it.  So I browsed around on the interweb hoping to find some advice.  This is probably all you need, a single discussion on stackoverflow.com where several different options are discussed.  I went with the top-rated one and I also discovered several photos on Google Images of people doing it this way.

So here's how Nich Fugal did it, and I like it very much, except there is a mistake on his diagram (55 and 75 ohms are the same colors).  Easy enough to correct, he provides an Adobe Illustrator document which you can import into Inkscape if you don't have Illustrator (I don't).

While I was making the small correction, I re-arranged the glyphs to fit on Avery 5160 mailing labels, I have some laying around here from when I was printing address for Christmas cards.  Here is the Inkscape document (for printing labels) if you want to use it.


You'll see some very faint lines, these are the approximate locations of the labels -- I'm a smidge off but it is pretty dang close.  You can make these lines completely transparent for printing or delete them altogether.  There are also some centerlines that I used to center the glyphs on each label.

Here are a couple of photos:

Applying the labels, my daughter Emma holding up the labels so I could take a photo...

The finished drawers!
I will probably create some "sub" drawers for the "10_" resistors, as this drawer is pretty stuffed.  Thanks to Nich Fugal for publishing these drawings, and check out his blog, called Makeatronics.