Electronics Committee - New Gear Has Arrived!

Thanks to all who suggested gear, especially a thanks to @Carpman who started the process soooo many months ago!

The Rigol scope is to arrive hopefully today but the rest is here.

Gratten ATF20B Function Generator (company changed name from Atten)

Signstek M4070 LCR Meter

Signstek MESR-100 V2 ESR Meter

I have added these to our wiki page and will be uploading the manuals as soon as I get PDF versions.

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Nice! Still waiting on my own 1054Z to show up.

VERY nice :smile:

Thank you for getting that ESR meter. For those of you who have dealt with bad caps this piece of gear will make troubleshooting those a piece of cake.

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Look forward to using it myself. Got a 42" LCD TV with the typical caps.

The ESR meter can also be used to make milliohm resistance measurements. Just make sure you use very short test leads, hopefully the ones it came with. Also make sure to discharge the caps first! :wink:

The key to the meter is that it passes a very low voltage @ 100kHz. The voltage is low enough to not turn on any silicon devices.

An example from EEVblog checking an old LCD for repair.

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With that milliohm resistance measurement capabilities I use mine for finding shorts on a board. It’s VERY easy to trace down shorted monolithic or Tantalum caps on a power buss with an ESR meter.

They have a “zero” function to zero out the resistance of the leads so don’t let that worry you. :smile:

I’ll be covering using an ESR meter, including troubleshooting shorts, in the upcoming Test Equipment Basics class.

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Yeah, you must have not seen most of the test leads sitting around on the DMS shelves. :grimacing:

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@lampy. I dropped off 16 banana cables tonight in the electronics room. 8 red and 8 black in a box on the wire rack shelf near the other cables.

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@raymond thank you, you rock.

Thanks @Raymond!

As part of our Adafruit order, I’m also buying some Large & Small Alligator test leads, and some Male & Female jumper wires (the kind you use on headers of Arduino, Beaglebone, shields and the like).

How much are the alligator leads?

They have 36" ones and 18" ones at Harbor Freight.

$2.80 per set of 12 15" color coded.

I’m adding this stuff to our Adafruit order to get to the 30% Makerspace discount. Strangely Adafruit does not have flux pens?! Any other small consumables you think we need?

I prefer this to flux pens. You can buy it locally at Fry’s and I think Jim has something similar at Tanner’s. It’s something I will be demonstrating when I do the Soldering 101 course.

I am very excited about this new equipment. I have worked with the scope and the function generator earlier this week, and both look pretty nice for the low price paid for them. I also had the chance to use the LCR meter to measure a capacitor that was poorly marked, and it was very quick and clear about what the capacitance value was.

I also have an interest in controlling/acquiring data to/from the scope and function generator. Basically the function generator has an arbitrary waveform generation mode, and how cool would it be to be able to control it from the PC? So I made an effort on Monday and Tuesday to write a driver to control the Gratten function generator. I found an appropriate cable, but was unable to get any response from the device yet. There is no driver available online, but I have found many references to software that may have shipped with earlier revisions of the device. There is a command set in the manual for the device. There are also emails/blogs online evidencing the fact that other engineers have tried and failed communicating the this function generator. I am trying to see if I can get in contact with (Gr)Atten to see if I can get in contact with an engineer. I’ll let everyone know how this goes.

I’d like to control the scope as well. Unsure how this will go, as I cannot find a driver for it either. My instinct says that control of both devices is possible, but will require fashioning custom drivers for each. I am up for the challenge since it would be way cool to be able to acquire waveform with scope, then turn around and generate that very waveform from the function generator. Also, we could do a lot characterizing filters by exciting with impulse, then capturing impulse response with scope, processing data in PC. The possibilities are limitless.

All in all, I am glad electronics is getting some up-to-date, extremely useful equipment for the lab. Nice work, Lampy!

@schrodinger123, the shipping boxes for the gear is under the shelf that is between the primary benches. In that box is any manuals software that came with the gear. I remember at least one CDROM in there. Maybe there is a folder of drivers, manuals or software.