[Alex Busman]‘s first foray in iOS programming looks like a pretty useful tool. He came up with Ohm Sense, an iPhone app that will take a picture of a resistor and calculate the value based on the color bands. It’s a great tool that we wish we had when we were starting out. At 99 cents, the app is also much cheaper than the emotional cost of our relationship with Violet.
[Alex]‘s used OpenCV for processing of the image data. The app works by scanning the image from the top-left corner and continuing until it sees a beige rectangle. After a bounding box is drawn around the resistor, the iPhone scans the image for columns of color. After a little interpretation, the value of the resistor is displayed on the screen. While it only works on resistors with beige plastic now, [Alex] says he’ll expand that in the future to include blue bodied metal-oxide resistors. [Alex] says the coding only took a week, so if anyone would like code a similar app for Android, be sure to tell us on our tip line.
This isn’t [Alex]‘s first Hack A Day build. We featured his Handy Board project that uses an NES controller to play some chiptunes earlier this summer. Compared to the projects we’ve let slip over the last few months, it’s good to see someone did something productive with their summer.
[Alex] posted a demo of his resistor app on YouTube. Check it out below.
