ESR meter upgrades

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

vintage and solid-state arent 2 words you often hear together.
you mean 70's and 80's ?

[Rado108]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

Which ESR meter would you reccomend for testing caps in vintage solid state audio gear? Do i need LCR so i can measure at different frequencys?

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

yes,
lots of new features.
but the biggest thing was the circuit for power.
the original 8pin microcontroller seemed to not go into sleep-mode sometimes and was draining the battery

[jellytot]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

Thank's Stj have you found this better than the original.

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

i forgot to say,
you need to reprogram the 8 pin microcontroller that controls power, or replace it with a small circuit

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

good - because the replacement software wont fit a 324

this is actually built for a 1284 but it should work i think
it expects a 20Mhz crystal
changed config files are included for viewing

[jellytot]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

Atmega 644p

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

what cpu is in it?

[jellytot]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

i do M builds for the TC1 with a rotary encoder and 20MHz if anybody wants it posted.

Hi Stj. I'm interested in your TC1 project... can you provide more info please/
Thank you.

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

not seen those before,
the ones i refered to are all one colour.
i think the blue has splines on the shaft, the light green has the half-moon shaft type.
i call it that anyway

[Per Hansson]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

You can see a photo of the top of the encoder in my original build photo way back in this thread: https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...6&d=1468518476
Here is how the bottom looks, it is light green, this is what was delivered with the DIY kit...

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

was the encoder blue?
i buy the light green ones - they seem better quality

[Per Hansson]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

I compiled a new build of Karl-Heinz firmware from the new GIT repository a few days ago.
It works well on my GM328R, this time I only included a 20Mhz build.

I also replaced the encoder and that fixed the bad behavior I described earlier in the thread with Madires firmware.
I made a small post on eevblog about it if you're curious:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testge...41/#msg4259041

[stj]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

lol - it shouldnt go directly into cal,
it should show a message and wait for confirmation with the button.

[eccerr0r]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

This is annoying:

I had a transistor that was shorted... stuck it in the avr transistortester...

Went into cal mode! What a pain...

[Bob Parker]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

Considering the title of the thread I didn't want Bop Parkers great ESR meter to feel left out!
So here it is with some nice new bright Lite-On LTS-5003AWC 7-segment LED's before and after

Original LED's:


Replacement LED's:

Thanks Per. It's amazing how much brighter even cheap Chinese displays are, compared to what was available back in 1995 when I designed the original meter! 👍

[Bob Parker]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

There is one thing ESR meters should have, which is Kelvin sensing (4-wire measurement capability), which keeps measurement errors to a minimum.

The "Blue2" ESR meter has that.

[Per Hansson]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

Considering the title of the thread I didn't want Bop Parkers great ESR meter to feel left out!
So here it is with some nice new bright Lite-On LTS-5003AWC 7-segment LED's before and after

Original LED's:


Replacement LED's:

[eccerr0r]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

Curiosity... what's the word(and language) that the "U" comes from when the avrtransistortester displays voltage for Vf and Vbe? (It whimsically says Uf=0.700 or something for diodes, etc.)

I would have thought for an English port it should have V for Voltage. I guess this is a pet peeve that I need to change on my unit...

[eccerr0r]

Re: ESR meter upgrades

I should figure out how to upgrade mine... build my own fw, etc. Too bad the one I have does not have the pins ported out on a 2x3 or 2x5 Atmel 0.1" header