We’ve all been there; you need a certain resistor for testing, but just don’t have it (or you simply can’t find it in your jumble of parts). While you could venture out to a local electronics store that may or may not exist, or order something that will arrive in a day or two, you could instead “make your own” on the fly with the Ohm Parade programmable resistor.
The device features a series of 8 resistors sized to 10 ohmns to the “x” power. So the first resistor is 10, the second is 20, the third is 40 ohms, and so on, until getting to 1.3K, which is approximately 10 to the 8th power. Each of these resistors can be enabled with a little DIP switch, creating a total resistance that can equal anything you want up to 2.56K in 10 ohm steps. Or nearly so, as 1.3K is only quite close to the 1.28K that it would use in a perfect world.
If functions as a sort of simple, and quite small decade resistance box. Or perhaps a “binary box,” would be more accurate, since the resistance divided by 10 works out to be the binary input on the DIP switches. Even for those with a complete and entirely organized set of resistors (anyone?) it looks like a great tool for experimentation!
