Post by newey on Oct 21, 2012 9:38:13 GMT -5
I went to law school to avoid doing math, because I flunked Calculus 101, thereby dashing my hopes of the Nobel Prize in Physics ;D.
So, when I got into this guitar wiring stuff, I found myself having to trot out Ohm's law on a regular basis. Luckily, in this digital age in which we live, there are online calculators to help dummies like me figure out series capacitance and so forth.
Our member wolf has a good such calculator on his website. But I got tired of having to surf over to an online calculator.
So, I downloaded this application to my desktop:
Electronics Assistant (freeware download)
I now can do this stuff from my desktop, and it's got everything one would ever need and more. It calculates resistances, capacitances, inductances, reactances, LED resistor dissipation, pretty much the whole shebang.
It even has a neat "point-n-click" resistor color code calculator. I haven't had the occasion to use this yet, but I can see where it would be very handy.
Another thing I like is that each calculator shows the theory and underlying equations off to the side, which is a good reminder since I cannot seem to remember the theory: "Do caps add in parallel? Or, is that resistors?". This way, it's staring me in the face as soon as I open the appropriate calculator, so if it's simple addition, I don't need to use the app.
I always worry a bit with Freeware, but my Norton software says the .exe file is safe, for what that's worth. It is stated to run in any Windows OS since 98, although apparently it's a bit of a crapshoot in Mac OS or Linux-based systems. Works fine in my Vista, anyway, which is sort of the red-headed stepchild of Windows.
Anyway, I found this download to be quite useful, so I'm throwing it in the mix here, so to speak.
So, when I got into this guitar wiring stuff, I found myself having to trot out Ohm's law on a regular basis. Luckily, in this digital age in which we live, there are online calculators to help dummies like me figure out series capacitance and so forth.
Our member wolf has a good such calculator on his website. But I got tired of having to surf over to an online calculator.
So, I downloaded this application to my desktop:
Electronics Assistant (freeware download)
I now can do this stuff from my desktop, and it's got everything one would ever need and more. It calculates resistances, capacitances, inductances, reactances, LED resistor dissipation, pretty much the whole shebang.
It even has a neat "point-n-click" resistor color code calculator. I haven't had the occasion to use this yet, but I can see where it would be very handy.
Another thing I like is that each calculator shows the theory and underlying equations off to the side, which is a good reminder since I cannot seem to remember the theory: "Do caps add in parallel? Or, is that resistors?". This way, it's staring me in the face as soon as I open the appropriate calculator, so if it's simple addition, I don't need to use the app.
I always worry a bit with Freeware, but my Norton software says the .exe file is safe, for what that's worth. It is stated to run in any Windows OS since 98, although apparently it's a bit of a crapshoot in Mac OS or Linux-based systems. Works fine in my Vista, anyway, which is sort of the red-headed stepchild of Windows.
Anyway, I found this download to be quite useful, so I'm throwing it in the mix here, so to speak.
