I decided since I’m going to start prototyping circuits at home I need to get some resistors. For the last 8 years I’ve mostly used surface mount resistors at work and my old resistor kits from school have long been thrown out. I’ve done a bunch of searching and found that good old eBay seems to have the best deals on resistor kits. The eBay store Sunpec has some good deals on kits. The kit I chose was Carbon Film Resistor 5% 1/4W Assortment Kit. The kit includes 50 different values with 50 pieces of each value, that’s 2500 resistors. The kit cost $18.99 which included shipping from China. I received the kit about a week after placing the order and all the resistors were there. There were a few values of resistors that didn’t match the description but they were really close…they probably ran out of the listed value and used the closest replacement.
The packs were not marked so I had to go through and write the value on each bag. I felt a little embarassed since I’ve been working with surface mount resistors for so long I had to break out the resistor color codes, but o-well.
Each value of resistor is sealed in a plastic bag like this:
Here is the entire kit: (The kit doesn’t come in the box)
And just for prosperity here is a good chart of the resistor color codes:
