Resisty – Resistor CAPTCHA – solve the resistor values to post a comment!

Pt 2837
We are thrilled to release a solve-the-resistor CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress! This plugin will draw a random 5% or 10% resistor and four color band sliders beneath it. The commenter needs to match the colors on the sliders to the colors on the resistor. Commenters don’t actually need to know how to read resistors, but this will help them as they post comments on site that use this plugin. Random resistors are generated from E12 and E24 decade values (so there’s never something like a 4.6K Ohm resistor. Plugin created by: Adafruit Industries – Daigo Kawasaki, Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone. It’s open source, so please feel free to use it and improve upon it!

Our goal is to teach a little about electronics as people participate online. We’ll see how it goes! You can try it out in the comments on our site right now!


Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Join Adafruit on Mastodon

Adafruit is on Mastodon, join in! adafruit.com/mastodon

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


Maker Business — “Packaging” chips in the US

Wearables — Enclosures help fight body humidity in costumes

Electronics — Transformers: More than meets the eye!

Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Silicon Labs introduces CircuitPython support, and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Guardian Robot, Weather-wise Umbrella Stand, and more!

Microsoft MakeCode — MakeCode Thank You!

EYE on NPI — Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — #NewProds 7/19/23 Feat. Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 CircuitPython Powered Internet Display!

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



132 Comments

  1. I am colorblind of red green. I will see if it works for me too. If I fail it proves I am a computer. Good day sir.

  2. Testing this out lol.

  3. super easy to use!

  4. Ha!…Pretty brilliant though.

  5. This is the best thing ever! Well, the best thing I’ve seen in the past 10 minutes…. Love it.

  6. interesting!

  7. testo

  8. nice

  9. hehe… nice one! i like it. and helps me regaining my lost knowledge about resistor values ^^

  10. testing

  11. wow nice thing man

  12. i just want to test this new comment thing move along, nothing to see here.

    what about color blind people?

  13. @cyrus – please read any of the comments or look at the source code. there’s a color blind option and also, people who are color blind have commented here as you can see.

  14. I love it!

  15. n1

  16. This. Is. Genius!

    It would be super cool if there were other puzzles. Like an odd-one-out with, for example, two SMD components and one PTH, or two passives and a logic gate.

    Maybe even some simple math problems (like xkcd does on forum registrations, just more EE-themed) — “What’s the total resistance of an XYZ ohm resistor and an ABC ohm resistor in series?”

  17. cool!

  18. Yay I’m human!

  19. Awesome!

  20. GENIUS thing .)

  21. amazing!!!

  22. Wow, coooooooooo…l!

  23. Daniel W. Dugger

    This is amazing. Preventing spammers and helping people learn electronics at the same time.

  24. I need this for my dorkbot website!

  25. coool!!! xD

  26. another time xD

  27. Had to test it

  28. To all the comments about ‘bots solving it’, it is actually trivial to solve for a bot, don’t kid yourself that it isn’t.

    As for whether it would be worth their time, the question is self fulfilling.

    If this is shown to stop spam, more will use it, so it then becomes increasingly attractive to solve automatically, until it’s broken.

    I’d also point out that it’s not possible to use if you’re using a text reader and that it cannot be used on US governmental websites because it would violate disability grounds; it’s hard to use for someone who doesn’t have at least reasonable motor dexterity, and I’d also note that at least 10% of the US populace is considered to have a vision impairment.

    It’s not a bad idea, but over time it’s not entirely workable.

  29. great!

  30. nice Captcha!
    良いキャプッチャですね!

  31. Hmm, it would be trivial to circumvent this, how about getting a huge stack of photos of actual boards with components on them and ask people to identify value of “The resistor in the top-left corner” or “second from the right”.

    That would be *much* harder to crack.

  32. Good plugin!!!.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.