Mike Camp's Resistorganizer Aims to Put Paid to Peering at Tiny Color Bands for Good

Maker Mike Camp has put together a device that aims to staring at resistor color codes during spring cleaning a thing of the past: the Resistorganizer.

"So, my workshop/lab is a mess. Organization isn't my thing. Well, it's not my default setting. Anway, when it comes time to wrap for the day and you have a pile of components on your workbench, what do you do? Do you meticulously sort your resistors? No. You throw them into a pile, a box, or… whatever," Camp explains of the problem.

"Perhaps you've spent enough time staring at color codes that you can pick up a resistor and immediately tell what its value is. I cannot do this," Camp continues. "Nor do I care to. It's only after I stick the resistor in question into a parts tester or multimeter that the color bands on the damn thing make any sense to me. Also, I doubt there are many who can spot the value they need from within the pile. So, we tend to take a new one from stock and the pile grows."

The solution, then, is to throw technology at the problem. The Resistorganizer is a PCB designed to be connected to a solderless breadboard using the pin header on its long side. A Raspberry Pi Pico drives the board, having it polling each row of the breadboard using a single analog-to-digital converter (ADC) pin connected to a number of Texas Instruments CD74HC4051 analog multiplexer chips.

Using a voltage divider, with reference resistors to improve accuracy, the Resistorganizer finds each resistor inserted into the breadboard and calculates its resistance value. LEDs along the board light up to provide visual feedback on which resistor is being measured, while an LCD panel shows the reading — along with a way to move between resistors, selecting them based on increasing and decreasing your target resistance value. Pluck the resistor next to the LED out of the breadboard, and you've got exactly what you needed — no peering at color codes required.

"The philosophy here is that the Resistorganizer is something that can sit on your bench and you just use it. Scan, scroll, done," Camp writes. "BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! Since we're utilizing a RPi Pico, why not use the 'W' variant and have it talk to NodeRed or something else to keep a database of your resistors! Then you can easily build some kind of HTML front end that shows you, at a glance, the resistors you have in the Resisorganizer. <ahem> pardon me while I get my scope creep under control. thank you."

More information on the project is available on Camp's Hackaday.io page.