Electronical and Electromechanical Explorations

This blog organizes and presents some of my various projects and musings related to taming wild electrons and putting them to work. Projects are listed down the right side of the page.

Voltage and Current Meter

As an early lab project, I'm designing a fairly simple piece of test gear whose purpose is to show the voltage at a probed point in a circuit, along with the current going through a tap in the circuit at that point.  This is useful for a lot of purposes -- most of the things I currently use a multimeter to measure.  As a simple voltmeter it is therefore quite useful... and I am planning to support two such measurement units per "box".  And since I will doubtless build a couple of them, I'll have the ability to display data on lots of circuit points simultaneously.

Hooking up multimeters to show both current and voltage is possible, but it is a bit unwieldy.  So this bit of gear will make that nice and simple.

I would like to get as high accuracy as I can (because high precision is cool and sometimes very helpful).  And I want to get the current side at least to accurately produce readings down to very low currents -- something that is very useful for measuring the power draw of integrated circuits, etc.

For displaying results, I want to use a small LCD screen and get it to look nice.

Design to follow soon!

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