While I quickly learned the very useful 4band resistor color codes, I never really mastered the 5 and 6band versions — yes, I can identify a few common patterns, but anything new is a problem. To ...

Check out the resistor color code reference cards I just whipped up. I was inspired by the PCB versions that Octopart has been crowdfunding this week. Those didn’t have the information I woul… ...

Multiply 39 by 1 and you get the base Ohm value of the resistor: 39. The final band is always silver or gold. This shows how much variance there might be to the resistor's Ohm value.

He came up with Ohm Sense, an iPhone app that will take a picture of a resistor and calculate the value based on the color bands. It’s a great tool that we wish we had when we were starting out.