What is the difference between AuF and uF

[Anonymous]

I just exported my board to a BOM so I could buy the parts. The capacitors confused me.

C2 in the photo is 10uF while C3 is 10ÂuF. What is the difference?

[jorge_garcia · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

I hope you're doing well. The A indicates that there is some character in the value that your spreadsheet software couldn't interpret correctly. To avoid this in the future it may be better for you to use the lowercase u instead of the normal mu.

In this case there's no real difference, it's just a text editor misinterpreting a character.

Let me know if there's anything I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[one-of-the-robs · Accepted solution]

If you look a bit closer, the character following the not-quite-an A is not a u but a Greek mu (which is the symbol you actually want but isn't an ASCII character).

I suspect what's going on is that some of your capacitors have been given ASCII approximation values (10uF with a lower-case U) while some have the technically correct but non-ASCII value with a mu. Since the latter is not plain ASCII, it's probably represented in UTF-8, as a multi-byte glyph code. The tool you're using to read the exported BoM doesn't understand UTF-8 so it shows two characters - the A with an accent is the UTF-8 two-byte sequence prefix, and the mu is the second half of the code represented in one of the DOS code pages. Quite a few of the two-byte UTF-8 symbols use a CP437 or CP851 encoding as their second byte.

[Anonymous]

Thank you guys so much for the quick replies!