Cheatsheets have you used or made one

[jonovid]

DIY cheat-sheets helpful or just for Dummies 
or just use a phone app?

[Zero999]

Not for that sort of thing. I know the capacitor code well enough and can convert pF to nF, in my head, faster than it would take for me to look it up, using that table.

I've used cheat sheets in the past for things such as assembler programming, but that's obsolete now.

[Cerebus]

Cheatsheets are great! A home made cheatsheet got me through my statistics course back in college.

I have a cheatsheet I made a while back, in fact I think I uploaded it here at some point. Very simple: a resistor colour code, complete with a prettified guide to the variety of bands (4, 5, and 6 band variants including tempcos) on one side and then on the reverse a list of E6, E12 E24 and E96 values.

I rarely use the colour code (which is ironic, as that's what I thought I was principally making it for), but not a single week goes by when I don't use the list of preferred values to pick practical values for components.

Here's a copy:

[Brumby]

SMD resistor codes.  Saved on my phone in a folder called "Reference".

[Rerouter]

Use them quite heavily, almost every PCB i make, I dedicate a layer to clearly label all pin functions, test point voltages, and other important information, I can then print this layer off, so while I am testing and writing code, I know clear as day what i am probing, or manipulating.

Then others for programming, E.g. pin functions, the registers controlling those functions, and etc from the datasheet, rather than having to refind that 20-30 times over the course of a project.

[lowimpedance]

Use them quite heavily, almost every PCB i make, I dedicate a layer to clearly label all pin functions, test point voltages, and other important information, I can then print this layer off, so while I am testing and writing code, I know clear as day what i am probing, or manipulating.

Excellent idea thanks.

[basinstreetdesign]

Use them quite heavily, almost every PCB i make, I dedicate a layer to clearly label all pin functions, test point voltages, and other important information, I can then print this layer off, so while I am testing and writing code, I know clear as day what i am probing, or manipulating.

Then others for programming, E.g. pin functions, the registers controlling those functions, and etc from the datasheet, rather than having to refind that 20-30 times over the course of a project.

+1

[German_EE]

Not a cheatsheet, a cheat manual.

I used to service about a dozen different manuals of elevator and each one came with two A4 binders of service information, that's twenty four manuals to carry in the van. Each time I fixed a fault I xeroxed the relevant page of the manual and put it in a binder, indexed by model or type, and gradually I found myself referring to this more and more. By the time I retired three other service engineers had picked up the idea but a few cautions come with it:

1) Whenever the main manual is updated you MUST update the cheat manual, a penciled note on each copied page reminds you of this.

2) In all cases where something is safety critical the main manual should be the only source of reference.

3) Once you adopt this system full time and leave your manuals back at base you will (once in a while) need a colleague to fax manual pages, this should happen less and less as time goes on.

[Benta]

Rerouter, the idea of one or more separate layers on the PCB for additional information is absolutely brilliant. Why the h*ll didn't I think of this myself?
This is added to my way of working immediately. Thanks.

[jolshefsky]

There's an Android app called ElectroDroid and it has a lot of cheatsheet-style tables and such. I have one that I made in a spreadsheet, printed out but seldom use ... it maps the combinations of R-27 value resistors in series to their voltage divider ratio, but I usually just use a trim pot.