Open source resistor “CAPTCHA” learning – commenting plugin for WordPress

Computers & Mobile
Open source resistor “CAPTCHA” learning – commenting plugin for WordPress

Pt 2837-1
One of the projects I wanted to get out the door for years was released today (beta) “Resisty” – It’s a fun way to learn about resistor values by having a commenter on a WordPress blog figure out the correct values before posting. It’s open source, hack away – can be ported to other blog systems and all that.

Next up, solving capacitors for phpBB. It would be cool to see more science, engineering, math and puzzle CAPTCHAs, they don’t need all be boring – they can be fun and interesting to the various communities.

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!

12 thoughts on “Open source resistor “CAPTCHA” learning – commenting plugin for WordPress

  1. Foozinator says:

    Matching colors, or even similar shades is not that difficult for a machine. Puzzles in general might be more difficult, but the best money, so far, is in cognitive skills, like with Asirra.

  2. Phillip Torrone says:

    hi @Foozinator – please review the post again, it’s meant to be an educational tool to teach electronics – this is not meant to fool machines. on the site it is deployed on there is zero spam, and there always will be zero spam because there is a human who reviews the comments no matter what, although wordpress does a fine job with spam on its own too – this plugin is for fun.

    1. adcurtin says:

      The whole point of a CAPTCHA is to stop machines from spamming.

      CAPTCHA: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

  3. Phillip Torrone says:

    @adcurtin – really? there are CAPTCHAs that help figure out text scans from old books, just because you’re seeing something used in a way that’s unfamiliar, novel, weird, interesting… it doesn’t mean it’s wrong – you’re on the MAKE site, this is what we do :)

  4. KentD says:

    Some people will to be able to do this. Colorblindness affects about 8 to 12% of people in the US, according to one source. Even if it is 1%, it is still not suitable as a CAPTCHA device.

  5. Phillip Torrone says:

    hi kentd, please review the site, the documentation of the plugin and/or all the people who are indeed color blind who say this is not a problem and have commented just fine. there’s a colorblind option in the source code and if you’re colorblind the CAPTCHA works as per many many color blind folks who have posted – try it :)

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