Capacitor ESR Meters?

Peak atlas do one but its not cheap!

Do you need an ESR meter? Usually one can just look at the voltage across the cap, operating, with a scope.

John

You must be careful with in circuit testers. Make sure you get one that does not put any more than 1.5 volts in the circuit for testing otherwise, you can damage components in many today's toys.

Look around for Bob Parker's ESR meter kit; it's also knows as the Dick Smith kit as DSE was an early source for it.

There seems to be a "space age" version out now in a cool blue case. Doesn't have quite the nerdish cred of the earlier project box. ;-)

One of them I was looking at said it used (from memory) a 100khz signal

RogerN

There's an idea, instead of an ESR meter I have an excuse.. err.. reason to buy a signal generator and a better scope! :-)

RogerN

I do that also john.

I use my HP sig gen with my tek 350Mhz dual trace (because that's on the bench) into a fixture I made just to do those things. I set the gen for 100mv out.. One BNC from the scope and one BNC from the gen into a little plastic util box, 2 probes coming out for the test, divider network inside :)

What's really unique about that is, I've used that to find SR.

AFAIK the Bob Parker/DSE ESR meter is no longer produced, I got one from a UK distributor that had remaining stock.

You can find Bob Parker on News:aus.electronics he may be able to provide more details.

Correct, they've moved on to the new version in the transparent case.

When I have the cash to spare, I plan to go for the Atlas one with LCD and safe capacitor discharging function.

At the moment I can't justify it as I already have an ESR meter and other tools for checking the lower values below the DSE's minimum range.

I use a General Radio Type 1611-A capacitance test bridge.

-- Paul Hovnanian mailto: snipped-for-privacy@Hovnanian.com

------------------------------------------------------------------ Bloody typical, they've gone back to metric without telling us.

Photo technique: Get slightly off-axis with the camera, and turn out any room lights. I then process thru Paint Shop Pro to tweak the brightness and contrast. (I just got Photo Shop, but don't know how to use it yet :-) ...Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

you can put a layer or two of toilet paper or tissue over the flash lens to diffuse it's output.Makes for a better picture.

For simply identifying bad esr caps, build a cheap one:

If you want to know the exact ESR value, you'll probably want a commercial unit.

Ed

That's not my photo. I just found that with Google.

Jim Thompson Inscribed thus:

Try "GIMP" Runs well in Windows. (sourceforge)

But here is how it is REALLY done...

Free tools and tutorials at

Why would anyone use any of that 'stuff' if they already have the finest professional image processing program in the known universe... Adobe Photoshop?

Gimp is so color-challenged that it can't even handle CMYK properly. ;-)

Because Photoshop does not remotely approach the capabilities of my custom code, of course.

Also because photoshop is outrageously overpriced.