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Comment by ericwood | Hacker News Reader

While American resistors are usually labeled with colored bands, the Russian resistors are green cylinders with their values printed on them

One nice thing about Russian ICs is that the part numbers are assigned according to a rational system, unlike the essentially random numbering of American integrated circuits.

This makes so much sense, it's a shame this style of labeling didn't catch on. It would have made my EE labs in college so much easier.

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I’m color blind. The markings would make everything so much easier. Having to check with someone else to make sure I get my colors right is such a pain. I hope I can order some.

Edit: If anyone can find labeled resistors for a reasonable price, I would be grateful.

This is why I loved it when introduced to SMT devices. Rather than those pesky colour bands, values were stamped on in a rational manner - two digits value, one digit power of ten. Say, 106 for a 1MOhm resistor, 102 for a 100Ohm one.

My lab productivity soared.

Wait what,holy shit this changes everything. Always thought those were just random manufacturer marks on smt resistors.

I found some of them. They look super helpful. How do you breadboard things with them?

You mostly don't - I had a decent setup for etching, so I just quick-and-dirtied a layout, put down a few extra pads where I suspected I might need some, processed a board and gave it a go.

The one important thing is to not pinch on the pincers - buy a good pair... :)

One last question: Where do you order them from? The labeled kits I see are around $120 and I’m on a college student budget. Thanks for answering my questions.

When I was on a student budget, I mostly asked my lab tutor kindly if I could help myself to the parts stocked by my university - the lab people were so happy someone actually wanted to build something that I was basically given free access to the parts bins.

Additionally, regional distributor ELFA had bins of 1000 1% 0805 resistors for ~$10/ea, so I just purchased a couple of bins at a time as I needed them until I had an E12-ish set.

If there is one nearby, I'd strongly suggest you visit a maker space - chances are they have SMT kits already.

I have 0603 resistor and capacitor sample book from Aliexpress. They are for about $25 (or $15 resistor-only) and the book format is convenient.

However, I still use wired parts for breadboarding.

You can easily use protoboard instead. 0805 goes between two pads no problem.

-That's very true, I should have been more specific - I mostly did circuits with the occasional IC in it - trying to dead bug a QFN or TSOP gets old fast. :)

Some time ago I saw an Iphone app that could "read" resistors by pointing your camera at them, but can't find it now.

Googling, I see one for Android, which I don't use:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mhdev.resi...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vivid_plan...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mhdev.resi...

there is an app for identifying resistor color combinations, could that help? (didn't use that myself)

This led me to this declassified document according to which Soviets used a mix of color codes and directly stamping values on resistor housings:

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00809...

The document is from 1950 though, so it greatly predates the standards used the 1983 Soyuz here.

The descriptions of the American components (resistors, diodes, etc...) reflect what I've seen in all of the consumer electronic components that I've busted-open here in the U.S. -- ones which are often made outside of the U.S.

The fact that these consumer electronics are built according to the American way as opposed to the Russian way - is that a reflection of selling to a U.S. market, U.S. companies selectively working with manufacturers that do things in a familiar way, general wide-adoption of the U.S. ways, or something else?

If I were to be in Russia or a former Soviet state, would I see consumer electronics looking more like this Soyuz clock?

It's a reflection of color coding (with painted rings or dots) being vastly cheaper than printing text proper. Many lower cost European transistors (almost exclusively the TO-92 variety) were marked with colored dots or half-rings. Similarly some film and tantalum capacitors were marked with colored dots as well.

Precision or otherwise higher grade (e.g. ceramic wirewounds) components were always usually marked with text.

Surprisingly large amount of soviet era consumer electronics are built quite similarly and use what in essence are military/space grade parts (and meticulously made cable looms). I assume that this is simply caused by using whatever was available in large enough quantity in combination with slightly different engineering culture (cable looms!).

If I think about it I probably can pinpoint the reason for the soldered cable looms: not only in SSSR but across the whole eastern block in general there simply weren't any reasonably cheap and reliable board to board or board to cable connectors for general use with reasonable density.

Edit to add: there were various ribbon cables used in eastern block electronics, but mostly with hand soldered connectors, not IDC. Two exceptions I can think of are Shugart-compatible floppy drives (although some Czech computers actually use ribbon cables with hand soldered board-to-card connectors) and some Metra-branded measurement equipment which uses MicroD-like IDCs internally.

I suppose the color coding was a cost issue - that is: I'm assuming the technology to reliably and legibly print small numbers on somewhat irregularly shaped cylindrical objects was more expensive than applying color bands back when this became a common way to do it.

I dislike color bands for two reasons:

1) I can never remember which color is which digit (it follows the rainbow, but not quite).

2) The colors can be hard to identify due to varying color shades, and quality ("is that read or brown?"). It also doesn't work well for people who are color blind.

What’s an example of the Russian nomenclature vs. the American style?

A typical Soviet IC part is 134ЛБ2. The 134 indicates the TTL family. The Л (L) indicates it's a logic gate IC and ЛБ indicates it's a NAND/NOR. If you know the categories, you know what more or less what the IC does.

A typical US IC part is 7490. 74 indicates the TTL family. But the 90 is arbitrary. The 7490 is a counter but 7491 is a shift register. The part number doesn't give you any idea what the IC does.

See Wikipedia for details on the Soviet IC system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_integrated_circuit_desi...

I agree on the resistors. The resistor colour code coupled with poor quality of colours on the actual resistors has me frequently reaching for a multimeter to just measure the resistance.

I just end up not reusing resistors. I have the unused ones in labeled drawers. Once I lose track of a resistor's value, I add it to the pile of components that need sorting.

I actually sorted that pile once for fasteners, but resistors are so cheap...

I remember going to a small electronic supplier for custom and mainly military things around 1999... The assembly folks would not waste time on getting a resistor and several other parts of they fell and at the end of the day the sweepings would be sold in a miscellaneous bag of parts

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