Units & Dimensions

Any Field of kind Unit Value — Resistance, Voltage, Length, Weight, and so on — isn't just a bare number. It's backed by a real Unit, which is what lets Ohmventory compare, sort, and filter values correctly even when different people typed them in using different units.

Dimensions and Units

A Dimension is a category of measurement — Length, Mass, Electrical Resistance, Data Storage. Each Dimension has one or more Units that measure it — Length has millimeters, centimeters, meters, kilometers, inches, feet, and so on. Every Field of kind Unit Value is tied to one whole Dimension (not one fixed unit), so an individual Item can record its value in whichever unit makes sense — one resistor's value entered in Ω, another's in kΩ — and they remain directly comparable.

Ohmventory ships with a broad, pre-built set of Dimensions and Units covering both electronics (Resistance, Voltage, Current, Capacitance, Inductance, Frequency, Power...) and general use (Length, Area, Volume, Mass, Time, Pressure, Data Storage...). Your Organization can also define entirely new custom Dimensions and Units if something you need isn't covered.

:::info Screenshot placeholder The Units settings page: a list of Dimensions (e.g. "Length," "Electrical Resistance"), each expandable to show its Units with their symbols. :::

How conversion works

Within a Dimension, every Unit has a conversion factor to that Dimension's base unit (for example, Length's base unit is the meter; a kilometer's factor is 1000). When you enter a value, it's stored both as originally typed and normalized to the Dimension's base unit behind the scenes. That normalized value is what powers unit-aware search — a search for "1kΩ to 5kΩ" correctly matches resistors whose values were entered in Ω, kΩ, or MΩ, because they're all compared on the same base scale.

Displayed values are automatically scaled back to a sensible unit — a stored value equivalent to 10,000 meters displays as "10 km," not "10000 m."

What's not covered

Currency is deliberately not modeled as a Unit — exchange rates fluctuate and don't fit the fixed-ratio conversion model every other Dimension uses. Temperature (°C/°F) isn't currently modeled either, since it requires offset-based conversion rather than simple multiplication, unlike every other supported Dimension.

For how to manage Dimensions and Units day to day, see Units Management.