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ICL8038 signal generator chip, manufactured by Intersil. An improved version, made by Exar corp. is available (XR8038A). It can be used to produce three types of waveforms, sine, square and triangle. The frequency, amplitude and duty cycle can be varied, and selection of waveform is done digitally. To further reduce the complexity, a 3-to-1 switch may be used in place of the digital selection circuitry. I made use of the digital selection mechanism because switches available on the market are prone to dirt accumulation and poor contact quality. Besides, the digital method is a lot cooler!

An extremely simple and low cost Sine/Square wave generator based on the Analog Devices AD9835 Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) Generator chip. The frequency can be set for any frequency from 1Hz to 10MHz in 1Hz resolution steps! All this with three push buttons and a novel "sliding window" LED display. The controller chip is a Microchip PIC16F628. There is no wiring, and the PCB fits into a standard UB3 Jiffy Box.

An adjustable power load is a piece of test equipment that often comes handy in the development of a certain electronics projects. For example, when you are building a power supply, it will come a time when you need to "simulate" a load to see how well your design performs as the load varies. Adding power resistors to the output can sometimes do in a pinch, but often you will not have the right resistor value handy with the right power rating for the test. This is where an adjustable electronic load comes handy. In this article, I'll show how you can build one using common components available to the electronics hobbyist.

I finally got round to making my capacitor ESR tester this week after finding a nice simple 5 transistor version. Unfortunately, for me, the design was only SMD so, I decided to replicate his schematic in Eagle PCB using a through hole component design. I will not be going into much detail regarding ESR or Equivalent Series Resistance Meters as, there is already plenty of other sources of information on the subject. Yet, every tinkering knows capacitors are guilty of a lot of sins in electronics. Capacitors love to throw red herrings! They can appear physically fine (no bulge), show good capacitance and hide in circuit, standing to attention like the Queens Guards hiding shorts and high resistance under their big hats. This is where the ESR tester can be a saviour, with the ability to test for "out of specification" high resistance, within the capacitor. They can also be used to test "in circuit", without the need to remove every capacitor in the circuit.

How would you like a 40 MHz frequency counter for under $50? What if I told you it also had an 8 digit LCD display, optional offsets for use in a receiver or transceiver, 10 Hz (even 1 Hz!) resolution, and also a six channel digital voltmeter built in? Direct reading with prescalers in the VHF version? Oh, and optional PC telemetry so you can watch the output on a PC, log the results, or graph drift?

RF laboratory often requires capacitance meter for small capacitors in pF range. Such a device can easily be built by yourself. Here, a measurement converter for PC serial port is presented. The frequency of an oscillator is reduced by the target and measured on a PC. The appropriate conversion then allows the direct display of the capacity. The input uses a short and low capacitance probe tip. The opposite pole is clamped to ground cable with a crocodile. The NE555 precision timer receives its operating voltage directly from the serial interface and produces a measurement object without C is a square wave with a frequency of 3.5 kHz. The signal is processed via the CTS input of the interface.

A typical capacitor checker measures the capacity (usually in micro farads) of the test capacitor. Some advanced units also test for leakage current. Most of these testers require that the capacitor be removed from the circuit. Unless the capacitor has totally failed, they will not detect a high ESR value. In a typical circuit, there may be 10's or 100's of capacitors. Having to remove each one for testing is very tedious and there is a great risk of damaging circuit boards. This tester uses a low voltage ( 250mv ) high frequency (150khz) A/C current to read the ESR of a capacitor in the circuit. The in circuit testing is possible because of the low voltage used for obtaining the measurement. The voltage is low enough that solid state devices in the surrounding circuitry are not activated and do not affect the low resistance reading we are attempting to obtain. A lot of capacitor checkers will be damaged if you happen to test a charged capacitor. This circuit is A/C coupled and will withstand up to 400vdc of charge on a capacitor (but watch your fingers!). The ESR checker will not detect shorted capacitors as they will read with a very low ESR value. If you are trouble shooting a circuit, you will have to use several instruments including your nose, voltmeter and oscilloscope to locate all the possible failure modes. My experience has found that the ESR meter catches about 95% of capacitor problems and potential problems.

Curious C-Beeper is a fun to build little probe that can be used to quickly detect the capacity of capacitors in pF nF range, test their stability with temperature changes, find broken wires, locate wires, trace wires on PCBs, and to locate live wires behind the walls without touching them. The circuit uses three transistors to make a most unusual capacitance beeper probe. When a capacitor is touched to the probe, the probe beeps at a frequency that varies with capacitance. The frequency change is so steep with capacitance that tiny capacitors may be precisely matched or an exact fixed value may be selected to replace a trimmer in a prototype. If the user has reasonably moist skin, simply holding one lead of the capacitor to be tested while touching the other lead to the probe is all that is necessary. The user's body forms the other connection through the beeper's metal case. When the beeper is properly adjusted it draws only 10 uA with nothing touching the probe - no power switch is required. This design is optimized for capacitors less than about 0.1 uF (100 nF). Large capacitors give a low frequency "clicking" sound and small capacitors sound a tone that increases as the capacitance decreases. Many decades of frequency change occur over the beeper's range giving even the more tone-deaf among us sufficient change to discern slight differences in capacitance. The entire device is powered by two CR2032 lithium cells that fit into TicTac box. The use of power switch is unnecessary since the circuit consumes almost no power when not being used.

I wanted a digital AC voltmeter to measure the output range from 0 to 150VAC with reasonable accuracy. Sure I could buy some premade DVM packages or use a microcontroller with a built-in ADC, but I wanted to make one from scratch myself using readily available parts I had on hand. I aimed for reasonable accuracy so I chose to have a 2 and a half display for the voltage, meaning the meter reads from 000 to 199. Below is the schematic of the AC DVM.

It was four years ago which I needed an Oscilloscope to be able to see the received codes from PT2272. (This is a Remote Control Decoder chip). Later on I made so many other things with this device which I will explain it later . ( such as the measurement of the low value voltages and even the supplies with high values and so on...). Although on that time I was in hurry so didn't design a PCB and I mount it on a pure, bread board. Its a good portable one, as the Battery is put on it, so you can have it in your pocket.