Have you ever had a giant pile of loose resistors to organize? I have! Instead of slowly calculating every single part in your head, I wrote this program, which allows me to simply call out the codes, and the computer responds with the part’s value! I’m sure I could make this much more useful in the future, but here’s the initial version.
Currently, it handles four and five-band resistors, capacitors, and inductors. It also recognizes EIA-96 parts.
If you find it useful, drop me a line and let me know what you’d like to see. I wrote a full-blown EIA-algorithm for this already, so extending the E192 and other tolerances and such would be a cinch. It has also crossed my mind to add a voice-powered calculator. If it gathers a following, I’ll certainly extend some new features. Otherwise, this is it.
Version History
1.3 Changes
*Fixed: Inductors and capacitors are now correctly interpreted as standard units (uF and uH).
1.2 Changes
*Fixed: Application now disables listening while text to speech synthesis is playing – preventing a feedback/loop issue
*Added: About dialog screen
*GPL Source Release: Code is now on Github!
i made something like this in C# a few months ago but it didnt work out too well because of the speech recognition issues.
what programming language are you using. you could do resistance value to color codes too.
Useful tool. It work’s perfect with my Indian accent too.
Awesome job mate.
Cheers
Hello i’m colour blind, it wouldn’t it be great if there was some way to help the colour blind out too!
i’ve tried taking pictures on my phone camera before and upping the saturation and stuff.. still no good for me. If you could hook up a camera to something like this.. i think you could make … maybe …millions and millions of colour blind friends!!!
Well i thought i’d just put it out there..
Regards
Mark
Hi, very useful tool.
Is it possible to translate it in another language (ie french)?
I can translate those terms if you want.
Thank you
Great application. There was one hiccup on my system (Win 7 64) – It wanted to listen to the stereo out channel instead of my mic. I had to disable the stereo recording channel for it to switch over properly.
Awesome start though!
@Jordan – It’s all done in C#. Had to carefully construct the grammar so that there’s little room for confusion (Specifying the lookup-type before each part, as well as allow for ways to remove confusion (For example, EIA letters can allow either the letter, or the phonetic international alphabet).
I never considered a “nearest value” lookup function. Specify a target resistance and tolerance, get a value/color code in return. Not a bad idea
@Mark – Image recognition…that’s not a bad idea! I’ve got some OpenCV based projects coming up – this would make a *great* tool. Keep an eye out, I’ll be trying this!
@Stephanie – Sure. I spent a few minutes last night creating a proper installer. I’ll add some i8n support – Drop me an email (anthony.clay on this domain) and I’ll be in touch about creating a french grammar – or add a way to build your own custom grammar.
@Kaj, it just grabs the default device for recording. I’ll put in a change to add a config dialog and settings.
There are some bugs.
#1. “4 band resistor Yellow Violet Gold Gold” gives 0R instead of 4.7R.
#2. If you have speech disabled and say “metric prefixes on” the program crashes (windows 7 U 32bit)
@GeriBoss – Thanks I’ll get those corrected.
Both items fixed!
successfully installed but crashes right after the start…
w7 home basic russian 64bit.
here comes “more details”:
—-
Сигнатура проблемы:
Имя события проблемы: CLR20r3
Сигнатура проблемы 01: eespeak.exe
Сигнатура проблемы 02: 1.1.0.0
Сигнатура проблемы 03: 500129ad
Сигнатура проблемы 04: System.Speech
Сигнатура проблемы 05: 4.0.0.0
Сигнатура проблемы 06: 4ba1f713
Сигнатура проблемы 07: 657
Сигнатура проблемы 08: cf
Сигнатура проблемы 09: System.ArgumentException
Версия ОС: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.2
Код языка: 1049
Дополнительные сведения 1: fb12
Дополнительные сведения 2: fb1226adcbe6c93c4255a5151d85e93e
Дополнительные сведения 3: ada9
Дополнительные сведения 4: ada9670cb3611c7d077766dd44b7bef1
—-
Hi Anthony, I’m back again with some bug reports, I hope you don’t mind =)
.
#1. Metric mode sometimes doesn’t work (still says “two hundred thousand ohms” instead of “two hundred kiloohms”), even though I enabled it.
.
#2. The program accepts and translates invalid color codes (ex. “4 band resistor Gold Gold Gold Gold”, which gives -1,1ohms).
.
#3. The decimal separator is sometimes comma, sometimes a dot, and it seems that the comma is not recognized by the TTS program, for example “4 band resistor red red gold gold” gives 2,2ohms, and the TTS says “two two ohms”
But if you say “4 band resistor red black yellow gray” it gives a value and a precision of 0.05%, and it says the “dot”.
.
Also, thank you again for the program, it is awesome despite the small bugs (there are always bugs). Take care!
Hi,
I like your tool, but it seems that the inductor function is not working properly. I always shows the value without the “µ”.
Regards,
Christian
And the next bug
You should mute the microphone while the text to speach is reading the values. I always get an endless feedback loop…
Regards,
Christian
wow, that quite neat. nevertheless, that a bit annoying to “4 band resistor”, could you add a radio box, to select what I am sorting now, so I could just say the color/numbers?
To reduce the error rate, The grammar has to branch as little as possible. This shouldn’t affect it much. I’ll probably add a way to switch/lock modes so that it can still stay hands-free.
what about SMD resistors? That would be so helpful!
For eia-96 encoded resistors, simply say “EIA resistor {digit} {digit} {letter}”. I’ll add the other tolerances soon.
For “regular” SMD encoding, I felt that it’s probably faster to do “digit digit multiplier” in your head than to call it out. But it will get added, in time.
Intriguing! Is it OSS? If you put it up on github, I’d be happy to contribute!
Another round of bugfixes, then I’ll probably throw it onto github.
Awesome! I’d love to hack on your code a bit.
Got the same problem as Andy, crashes right after executing the program.
Windows 64bit Home Premium, Intel Core i3, 4,00 GB RAM
Bug report is translated from polish into english, hopefully with the least amount of mistakes. If You’ve got a little free time to look this up or You’re just bored and feel need to analyze the problem – would be great
Error name: CLR20r3
Error 01: eespeak.exe
Error 02: 1.1.0.0
Error 03: 500129ad
Error: 04: System.Speech
Error 05: 4.0.0.0
Error 06: 4ba1f713
Error 07: 657
Error 08: cf
Error 09: System.ArgumentException
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3
Region settings: 1045
Additional information 1: fb12
Additional information 2: fb1226adcbe6c93c4255a5151d85e93e
Additional information 3: 9864
Additional information 4: 98643c2515c1b77cb35c0f02b13bb897
I expect this to be localization-related. I’ll give it a look, but once it’s on github, I’m sure someone that can reproduce it can fix it also.
I installed this on a W7 U x64 …
I didn’t have a problem.
Very nice.
What libraries are you using for the speech recognition and synthesis?
Just the .NET Speech.Recognition and Speech.Synthesis libraries.
Hi Anthony
Can you releas the source code of the program?
I’m new into speech recognition and would like to see the code of a working example for testing/lerning/…
If you dont want to releas it, can you send it just at my email adress?
Thx Fabio
Github now hosts the source. I’ll try to keep the binary/installer current on this page.