Build a Resistor/Capacitor Selection Box

Step 5: Complete!

I hope you enjoyed reading this guide to building your own resistor/capacitor selection box.  I would love to hear any suggestions on what I could add/change to make this box more versatile and functional.

Thanks for reading, and please post any comments, questions and suggestions you may have.

Comments

[wa7jos]

Nicely done! Excellent workmanship.
But I would suggest that your smaller picofarad selections are useless. The capacitance and inductance of the internal (and external) wiring will swamp the actual component values.
These small values are most often used in RF circuits where lead length must be kept as short as possible.
You would probably be better served to substitute larger capacitors on the other end instead of anything smaller than 1nf.

[MROHM]

(removed by author or community request)

[mattthegamer463]

Certainly those values have their uses, but I wanted to keep away from the realm of "arbitrarily large" and "arbitrarily small" so that there were the maximum number of useful values in there. 4700uF + anything, parallel or series, is useless.

[appsman]

it's not as bad as all that. 10 cm of #22 wire separated by 2 cm is less than 1pF. You can calculate other values here:
http://www.ampbooks.com/home/amplifier-calculators/wire-capacitance/

[mattthegamer463]

You're likely right, the values will be quite distant from what they say they are. However, having a non-specific "small" capacitance is useful for things. With large capacitances (10uF+) they are typically for power storage and smoothing purposes, and are often arbitrarily large. Having the ability to substitute them is not very useful.

[Ken Chevy]

Beautiful work, Matt!  I used to play with things like this when I was a young kid in my thirties about thirty years ago.  I still have one lying up in the attic I think.

Kudos!

Ken