Maybe 25 years ago I bought the same meter, mine is Dick Smith, "EA" is Electronics Australia. I use this meter 7 days per week during 25 years without any issue. I add two diodes in opositive way in parallel to the inputs, some times I forgot to discharge a capacitor and the diodes blowup without any damage to the meter. Best Regards.
I have same meter and put it together too. I got mine back in the 90's and it has never failed me and have the same insulating material in mine too. I love how it checks in circuit and shows what caps that should be changed and the fact that it reads very low resistances of inductors and resistors. Very nicely designed meter, it's had very heavy use and saved me a lot of time!!
I remember my old boss getting one of these in and I remember seeing him putting it together and showing me how to use it. Great ESR meter it never failed!!
That has been so dam handy for you, the amount of decent looking capacitors that have tested bad, not just on switchmode supplys but many ancient audio devices. Worth every penny :-D Your fluke multimeter has been very reliable for a long time, ignoring the minor recent display problem. Again a dam usefull bit of kit that gives you information, just like the ESR tester.
I built the identical meter; "best ESR meter that came out" and accurate. The only downfall, no 9volt battery holder to prevent shorts, "so like you I improvised".
The design featured in Electronics Australia "EA" magazine.. One of their many featured project builds. I remember Dick Smith electronics stores selling these kits..
Wonderful teardown an review dear sir. This is a great test equipment. I reaserched about it couples years ago and coped by the same processor code as it not available anywhere. Anyhow I made one analog one with digital ics buffer's and oscillator. That is really a fun and same way useful as digital one is. But those professional units aren't good which have a test button on them and you have to press that button once every time you test a cap.
Always love those meters. I’ve got a collection of ESR meters and short circuit faultfinding/sniffer probes. I Love the Hewlett-Packard current injector and tracer probes but they are getting stupid expensive… Also love my EDS “leak-seeker 89”. It’s got to be one of the absolute best short circuit sniffers that’s ever been on the market. (And Iv had multiples of all of them)😁 Simply because of its small compact design, exceptionally well thought out and evolved circuit, and Jesus it’s just so easy to use and works so well. But One thing I’ve always wanted… Is an analog esr meter. I’ve never had the time to build one and the only one available on the market is crazy expensive like $300 or something for a device that doesn’t look exceptionally well put together. I think it’s called the capacitor wizard or something like that… Would also love to have an analog milli-ohm and micro ohm meter. I guess some of my VTVm’s have that capability and some of my modern multi meters and LCR meters definitely have the ability to check low resistance… but I Would just love to have a small self-contained analog unit. So I don’t have to drag out expensive and touchy high end equipment just to check for low resistance shorts. Or when I’m on the road or checking something out at someone’s shop away from my gear. I’m a huge fan and collector of the Huntron tracker line of equipment… As well as the ”Toneohm” units. Been buying those for the past 15 years when they come up cheaply. My fascination with so-called “instant easy faultfinding devices“ started when I first started electronics… And didn’t know enough to use real lab gear. And also couldn’t afford a lot of real test equipment. So these “all in one” devices were so cool to me. Like magic. Now I have a few favorites for tracing out faults… Like the leak seeker, the De-5000 LCR meter, the HP current tracer probes, The Wavetek sf-10 short finding brush.... of course the flir thermal camera. That’s about all I use for faultfinding… But I still enjoy collecting and restoring them.
I bought and assembled one myself about six months ago and they are great. They are expensive though. I bought the kit from Australia and cost me around 128 dolls including shipping.
I got one of these and also the LOPT ringer tester both great tools i sent my ESR meter into Bob once as i had a issue with it funny enough the custom ic was faulty it would work fine for say a few readings then start to play up narrowed it down to that custom ic i am not sure if Bob is still around but super nice bloke he was quite suprised that this had hapen If you get time should make a video of how to use it as i get asked alot i just bought a ESR meter how do i use it
I made a version of this meter yonks ago from the schematic. I used a PIC micro though and wrote my own code however. It is very simple code and is pretty straight forward. I think I spent around 6 or 7 hours on the code portion. The most interesting part to me was the measurement itself is done- it uses the capacitor under test and a capacitor on the board to form a capacitive divider, and then sends current pulses through it alternately from ground and vcc. There's three different transistors to VCC with differing resistors to control the test current, which is how the different sense ranges are done. I am not sure how "smart" the original was with its autoranging, but mine worked by running at the lowest current range, and if the resistance reading was under 1/10th of full scale for that range, it'd bump the current up to the next range and move the decimal point and try again. repeat until current is maxed out or reading is in range. Eventually I retired it when I got a proper job LCR meter. incidentally, that esr meter is good for other things- you can measure low value resistors with it, and wire resistances within reason, and PCB tracks. I have used it and the LCR meter to find PCB shorts on power rails by moving the probes around on the board to find the point of lowest resistance.
At an estate sale I aquired one of the original ESR meters made by Creative Electronics, read out is an analog meter. Creative electronics was owned by Carl W. Vette, who invented the ESR meter, his patent lasted 20 years, expiring in the 1990s, which is why Main Electronics and Dick Smith started selling their own stuff based on the same principle. Mr. Vette is still alive in his 80s, living at the same residence in Clawson MI that is printed on every one of his meters, 1417 N. Selfridge, Clawson MI.
Would be nice to have one. One of other most useful tool is the cheap LCR meter/semiconductor tester, maybe not super accurate but boy I was so happy when I got it.
0:44 You can't believe you've never shown us? I can't believe I've never thought to ask or look into it! (Mind you, for the work I do, the Shango066 audio method of ESR check works well enough).
I bought a BLUE ESR meter...Bob Parker design and made ( or cloned ) by ANATEK instruments about a year ago.....seems to work but the leads are hard wired inside the unit. I would need to replace with input jacks to switch out the test probes. Possibly a future project. Thanks Dave J K
The main reason for going to hard wired leads was because the resistance of banana plugs and jacks tends to vary as the leads are moved, especially on the bottom range which has 0.01 ohms resolution.
I have the Dick Smith (RIP) version. Also got the option to protect the device should I accidentally test a cap that still has voltage on it. Nice idea, but it added enough "resistance" that I couldn't always zero it out.
I have the anatek Blue and the new Blue2 the talking version which has better resolution, love it... By the way if anyone wants a clone of the Dick Smith Electronics version you can get them over at altronics .
Much nicer and chocked full of goodies than I would have guessed. Color me impressed "and" Color me embarrassed. I worked counter in a family electronics parts store in the mid 80's... I don't recall this alien (ESR) technology. My bad. I guess selling 1/4 watt resisters and fuses didn't qualify me for the important meetings 🙄 I would be proud to own that one 👍😁
It was actually a family run electrinics parts supplier (Main electronics in Vancouver) that introduced me to the ESR kit. He said they were flying off the shelves and everyone was building them and they were the best tool you could get to service SMPS. So I bit and bought one. My boss wouldn't even pay for it because he was old school and thought it was snake oil. Boy did I prove him wrong in a very short order and I was fixing power supplies in record time.
It's like I missed a decade or something. Your "parts supplier" was surely the Silicon-Messiah IMHO 🙄 BTW, that was a chunk of change to layout at the time. You were dedicated! The two revolutionary items I can recall from our salesman, Vinnie Boom Bott was the propane soldering iron and the red/green (LED) transistor tester. Clearly your neck of the woods was the place to be. Good times, good times 😁
I have one. Had it for many years. Pretty good analyzer for caps - value, leakage, ESR - plus inductor testing and measurement. Had to make a switch repair/modification as Sencore ran out of replacements years ago. Design flaw.
12voltvids Hear, hear!!! Between the often wildly excessive brightness of blue LEDs, and the fact that blue is more difficult to focus and tiring, blue LED displays are the devil! (Even though I like blue as a color as such.) My favorite for LED displays are actually the white ones. They also lend themselves very well to putting gels in front to get whatever color you want, like mimicking the turquoise of a VFD, matching the color temperature of the ambient lighting, or weirdo colors like lavender. :D
@@tookitogo White is good, I made a large format clock display with warm white LED. Orange is actually the easiest to read of them all. Those old Numitron displays and Panaplex are great.
12voltvids Yes! I wish they still made those display types. Just in bigger than back then. (One of my perpetually-in-progress projects is to build a giant-digit alarm clock that I can read without glasses and a) has superb usability (like some Sony alarm clocks) and b) doesn’t use grody red, green, or blue LEDs. 5” tall panaplex or numitron would be ideal. I’m probably going to use giant seven segment or dot matrix, but in white. Or maybe cobble 7-segment out of some addressable LEDs that have warm white LEDs in addition to RGB.)
@@12voltvids agree good for esr, however good esr is also a shorted cap, this tool shows capacitance and esr simultaneously, when frequency changed quality of the cap, helped me, save time with hundreds of amps repairs(the large caps test)
@@rumenmarkoff1214 I don't do this for a living and thus don't invest in test gear. I use what I have available. Investing hundreds is not a good business model unless there is payback and since I don't make much if any money working on electronics these days.
Heathkit ! ? .... Oh wow, now that takes me back, my first volt/ohm meter was one of those vacuum tube units which I thought was so cool. Good old days !
No I haven't. Perhaps someone else has, but I have never repaired this unit since it was built. I have changed the battery and that is all. I searched my channel in youtube studio and there is nothing related to this meter. Unless a changed the battery while working on another video.
uK8cvPAq I’m sure Dave would have shown it at some stage, it’s a Dick Smith kit and most Aussie electronics hobbyists and many pros would have built that kit.
@@johncitizen3361 Actually this one is a Bob Parker kit. See "Bob's" name etched onto the PC board. I thought it was a dick smith kit and referred to it as such and had to edit my dick smith comments out in editing once I saw "Bob" on the board, as this is a Bob Parker clone kit. Same thing, Dick Smith design, sold by Bob.
Did you ever notice that the chart is different on the MK-II version? Why? qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8900c3cb5ef2e93ed81a676b8718a444 In 2004 he said "• Front panel chart figures updated to reflect current-generation electrolytic capacitors." .. Hmmm .. which begs the question... which chart is correct? I have the same 1996 version as yours (Zilog has 9808 date code).
Neither chart is correct, because ESR is not a "pass/fail" value. For switchmode and other high frequency use, you need Low ESR, lower than the tables show. For audio or other applications, the caps could work fine even if ESR was far in excess of either table. So, the table is just an indicator, but has no relevance to what ESR is required for any particular circuit application.
@@johncoops6897 Yeah makes sense. I just had another look at both versions. Version I is labeled "worst case values" and version II is labeled "typical good reading". I gather that was the update / change.
@@techguy127com4 - I've found that most circuits will be quite stable even if some caps' ESR is way higher than it technically should be. In other words, when the circuits starts misbehaving and service is required, the ESR of relevant caps is literally "off the scale" compared to the figures printed on the ESR meter.. Also remember that many circuits use capacitors in parallel, which lowers the overall ESR enough to make the individual cap's ESR far less critical. A good example is PC Motherboards, which have 5, 10 or even more caps on the rails that supply the CPU - the PC will often still operate even when most of the caps have popped their lids LOL
@@johncoops6897 True! Being in the computer business for over 35 years I've seen just about everything from the very beginning, including reversed polarity electrolytics that exploded on the popular multi I/O boards that were used in all of the early 80's XT machines. They would blow in about 10 mins - loud snap, smoke and all. And although the "early" motherboards had their fair share of blown caps around the VRMs, it has easily been the PSUs that are far more troublesome right up to this day. I always laugh when I open them up and see the "VENT" brand caps - Yup, that's exactly what they did.. Lol :-)
@@johncoops6897 Thanks! That's a very accurate description. When ESR is high enough to make a circuit malfunction, it's usually way more than 10x the figure on the chart and often >99 ohms.
Cheap boss paid me well. I was making 80k back in the 80s when the average worker was making 30. We made a ton of cash then. Service dept was doing about 180k a year on labour charges and store was selling over a million a year in new stuff and this was a small shop, not a box box store.
DONT BUY THE ONES FROM THE COMPANY IN PORTUGAL! WHAT A NIGHTMARE! They shipped mine without any shielding for the IC and it was bad. They wouldn't do a damn thing to make it right.
uK8cvPAq Some versions of this meter have added input protection, at the expense of losing the ability to measure batteries. This is what Bob Parker says on the page below: “These ESR meters can generally handle being connected to capacitors charged to about 50V without damage, but like most other ESR meters they will be seriously damaged by being connected to such things as the main filter capacitor charged to 300V or more, of a 240V-powered switching power supply. Some versions of the EVB meter have extra protection as noted above.” bobparker.net.au/esr_meter/evb-esr.htm
Maybe 25 years ago I bought the same meter, mine is Dick Smith, "EA" is Electronics Australia.
I use this meter 7 days per week during 25 years without any issue.
I add two diodes in opositive way in parallel to the inputs, some times I forgot to discharge a capacitor and the diodes blowup without any damage to the meter.
Best Regards.
I have same meter and put it together too. I got mine back in the 90's and it has never failed me and have the same insulating material in mine too. I love how it checks in circuit and shows what caps that should be changed and the fact that it reads very low resistances of inductors and resistors. Very nicely designed meter, it's had very heavy use and saved me a lot of time!!
I’ve got 2 of those, a version 1 and a version 2, what I like is that they can test in circuit.
You can still get this original version kit from Altronics in Australia.
I have this one too,built in the nineties, great piece for Tv vcr techs
I remember my old boss getting one of these in and I remember seeing him putting it together and showing me how to use it. Great ESR meter it never failed!!
That has been so dam handy for you, the amount of decent looking capacitors that have tested bad, not just on switchmode supplys but many ancient audio devices.
Worth every penny :-D
Your fluke multimeter has been very reliable for a long time, ignoring the minor recent display problem.
Again a dam usefull bit of kit that gives you information, just like the ESR tester.
I built the identical meter; "best ESR meter that came out" and accurate. The only downfall, no 9volt battery holder to prevent shorts, "so like you I improvised".
Thanks for showing this at last.
The design featured in Electronics Australia "EA" magazine.. One of their many featured project builds. I remember Dick Smith electronics stores selling these kits..
Wonderful teardown an review dear sir. This is a great test equipment. I reaserched about it couples years ago and coped by the same processor code as it not available anywhere. Anyhow I made one analog one with digital ics buffer's and oscillator. That is really a fun and same way useful as digital one is. But those professional units aren't good which have a test button on them and you have to press that button once every time you test a cap.
Awesome. Thank you for making and posting this video. I enjoyed watching you display your ESR meter. Thank you again.
I've been wanting to get one of those for a while now. Thanks for the look inside.
Love mine, couldn't live without it.
Always love those meters. I’ve got a collection of ESR meters and short circuit faultfinding/sniffer probes. I Love the Hewlett-Packard current injector and tracer probes but they are getting stupid expensive… Also love my EDS “leak-seeker 89”. It’s got to be one of the absolute best short circuit sniffers that’s ever been on the market. (And Iv had multiples of all of them)😁 Simply because of its small compact design, exceptionally well thought out and evolved circuit, and Jesus it’s just so easy to use and works so well.
But One thing I’ve always wanted… Is an analog esr meter. I’ve never had the time to build one and the only one available on the market is crazy expensive like $300 or something for a device that doesn’t look exceptionally well put together. I think it’s called the capacitor wizard or something like that…
Would also love to have an analog milli-ohm and micro ohm meter. I guess some of my VTVm’s have that capability and some of my modern multi meters and LCR meters definitely have the ability to check low resistance… but I Would just love to have a small self-contained analog unit. So I don’t have to drag out expensive and touchy high end equipment just to check for low resistance shorts. Or when I’m on the road or checking something out at someone’s shop away from my gear.
I’m a huge fan and collector of the Huntron tracker line of equipment… As well as the ”Toneohm” units. Been buying those for the past 15 years when they come up cheaply.
My fascination with so-called “instant easy faultfinding devices“ started when I first started electronics… And didn’t know enough to use real lab gear. And also couldn’t afford a lot of real test equipment. So these “all in one” devices were so cool to me. Like magic.
Now I have a few favorites for tracing out faults… Like the leak seeker, the De-5000 LCR meter, the HP current tracer probes, The Wavetek sf-10 short finding brush.... of course the flir thermal camera. That’s about all I use for faultfinding… But I still enjoy collecting and restoring them.
I bought and assembled one myself about six months ago and they are great. They are expensive though. I bought the kit from Australia and cost me around 128 dolls including shipping.
I got one of these and also the LOPT ringer tester both great tools i sent my ESR meter into Bob once as i had a issue with it funny enough the custom ic was faulty it would work fine for say a few readings then start to play up narrowed it down to that custom ic
i am not sure if Bob is still around but super nice bloke he was quite suprised that this had hapen If you get time should make a video of how to use it as i get asked alot i just bought a ESR meter how do i use it
Yes, he is still around!
I made a version of this meter yonks ago from the schematic. I used a PIC micro though and wrote my own code however. It is very simple code and is pretty straight forward. I think I spent around 6 or 7 hours on the code portion. The most interesting part to me was the measurement itself is done- it uses the capacitor under test and a capacitor on the board to form a capacitive divider, and then sends current pulses through it alternately from ground and vcc. There's three different transistors to VCC with differing resistors to control the test current, which is how the different sense ranges are done. I am not sure how "smart" the original was with its autoranging, but mine worked by running at the lowest current range, and if the resistance reading was under 1/10th of full scale for that range, it'd bump the current up to the next range and move the decimal point and try again. repeat until current is maxed out or reading is in range. Eventually I retired it when I got a proper job LCR meter. incidentally, that esr meter is good for other things- you can measure low value resistors with it, and wire resistances within reason, and PCB tracks. I have used it and the LCR meter to find PCB shorts on power rails by moving the probes around on the board to find the point of lowest resistance.
That's why it is called a low ohms and esr meter.
@Kevtris , beautiful work :3 can you share the code plz
Ahhh it’s a tricky Dicky kit, we had a lot of Dick Smith stores in Australia and that tester is a beast.
At an estate sale I aquired one of the original ESR meters made by Creative Electronics, read out is an analog meter. Creative electronics was owned by Carl W. Vette, who invented the ESR meter, his patent lasted 20 years, expiring in the 1990s, which is why Main Electronics and Dick Smith started selling their own stuff based on the same principle. Mr. Vette is still alive in his 80s, living at the same residence in Clawson MI that is printed on every one of his meters, 1417 N. Selfridge, Clawson MI.
The Price is Right!
Oops... maybe that's Bob Barker.
Beautiful!
Would be nice to have one. One of other most useful tool is the cheap LCR meter/semiconductor tester, maybe not super accurate but boy I was so happy when I got it.
Time to check the caps on your ESR meter. Lol Great video as usual
0:44 You can't believe you've never shown us? I can't believe I've never thought to ask or look into it! (Mind you, for the work I do, the Shango066 audio method of ESR check works well enough).
I bought a BLUE ESR meter...Bob Parker design and made ( or cloned ) by ANATEK instruments about a year ago.....seems to work but the leads are hard wired inside the unit. I would need to replace with input jacks to switch out the test probes. Possibly a future project. Thanks Dave J K
The main reason for going to hard wired leads was because the resistance of banana plugs and jacks tends to vary as the leads are moved, especially on the bottom range which has 0.01 ohms resolution.
I have the Dick Smith (RIP) version. Also got the option to protect the device should I accidentally test a cap that still has voltage on it. Nice idea, but it added enough "resistance" that I couldn't always zero it out.
He's not dead yet
I have the anatek Blue and the new Blue2 the talking version which has better resolution, love it... By the way if anyone wants a clone of the Dick Smith Electronics version you can get them over at altronics .
where can i find the firmware of this
Much nicer and chocked full of goodies than I would have guessed. Color me impressed "and" Color me embarrassed. I worked counter in a family electronics parts store in the mid 80's... I don't recall this alien (ESR) technology. My bad. I guess selling 1/4 watt resisters and fuses didn't qualify me for the important meetings 🙄
I would be proud to own that one 👍😁
It was actually a family run electrinics parts supplier (Main electronics in Vancouver) that introduced me to the ESR kit. He said they were flying off the shelves and everyone was building them and they were the best tool you could get to service SMPS. So I bit and bought one. My boss wouldn't even pay for it because he was old school and thought it was snake oil. Boy did I prove him wrong in a very short order and I was fixing power supplies in record time.
It's like I missed a decade or something. Your "parts supplier" was surely the Silicon-Messiah IMHO 🙄 BTW, that was a chunk of change to layout at the time. You were dedicated! The two revolutionary items I can recall from our salesman, Vinnie Boom Bott was the propane soldering iron and the red/green (LED) transistor tester. Clearly your neck of the woods was the place to be. Good times, good times 😁
@@ovalwingnut butane soldering iron. I remember those. I had one.
looks like quite a lot to that little esr meter I recently bought one that does not work half as good as yours
Have you ever tried out a Sencore Z-Meter? Thanks again for the videos!!
I have one. Had it for many years. Pretty good analyzer for caps - value, leakage, ESR - plus inductor testing and measurement. Had to make a switch repair/modification as Sencore ran out of replacements years ago. Design flaw.
Hopefully sometime in the future, I would love to get me one the blue version of the ESR Meter. =)
Blue = UG. I am not a fan of blue readouts. Hard to read.
12voltvids Hear, hear!!! Between the often wildly excessive brightness of blue LEDs, and the fact that blue is more difficult to focus and tiring, blue LED displays are the devil! (Even though I like blue as a color as such.)
My favorite for LED displays are actually the white ones. They also lend themselves very well to putting gels in front to get whatever color you want, like mimicking the turquoise of a VFD, matching the color temperature of the ambient lighting, or weirdo colors like lavender. :D
@@tookitogo White is good, I made a large format clock display with warm white LED. Orange is actually the easiest to read of them all. Those old Numitron displays and Panaplex are great.
12voltvids Yes! I wish they still made those display types. Just in bigger than back then. (One of my perpetually-in-progress projects is to build a giant-digit alarm clock that I can read without glasses and a) has superb usability (like some Sony alarm clocks) and b) doesn’t use grody red, green, or blue LEDs. 5” tall panaplex or numitron would be ideal. I’m probably going to use giant seven segment or dot matrix, but in white. Or maybe cobble 7-segment out of some addressable LEDs that have warm white LEDs in addition to RGB.)
@@tookitogo I have one with digits that are 5" high.
Seems pretty simple design. What's to stop people selling clones of it ?
Code in the microcontroller. The code is not available to write your own chip.
Does this kit have protection if the capacitor is charged?
Thanks for your videos.
No, hence the warning to discharge them first. Easy enough to put diodes in, but I am not that dumb to measure a charged cap.
Yes. It can tolerate about 50V DC.
Love the cardboard idea, but I'd need to find some other material. Too moist around here. I'm afraid it would become resistive and screw things up.
Black tape around the battery.
Where can I buy one like this lovely esr meter ?
Do a google. Lots of places sell the new bob parker clone.
@@12voltvids what's the model no.for it so i can search
Open your eyes. Read the posts and Video Title. Open Google. Type in what you read, hit search. Read the search results. Don't be lazy.
Better get something decent like Tonghui TH2822E Handleld LCR Meter(OEM for B&K Precision)
Shows what you know. This will measure esr and low ohms every bit as good as any commercial meter.
@@12voltvids agree good for esr, however good esr is also a shorted cap, this tool shows capacitance and esr simultaneously, when frequency changed quality of the cap, helped me, save time with hundreds of amps repairs(the large caps test)
@@rumenmarkoff1214
I don't do this for a living and thus don't invest in test gear. I use what I have available. Investing hundreds is not a good business model unless there is payback and since I don't make much if any money working on electronics these days.
Heathkit ! ? .... Oh wow, now that takes me back, my first volt/ohm meter was one of those vacuum tube units which I thought was so cool. Good old days !
No, it's not a Heathkit.
I can't belive. ( ;
I know the truth. Everything I don't understand works because it's filled with witches
Are they made of wood?
Yes you have taken that apart on CZcams.
You replaced a capacitor or something a while back.
No I haven't. Perhaps someone else has, but I have never repaired this unit since it was built. I have changed the battery and that is all. I searched my channel in youtube studio and there is nothing related to this meter. Unless a changed the battery while working on another video.
I think it might of been EEVblog who made that video.
uK8cvPAq I’m sure Dave would have shown it at some stage, it’s a Dick Smith kit and most Aussie electronics hobbyists and many pros would have built that kit.
@@johncitizen3361 I think it might of been during a repair or something so it's probably hidden within a video of a different title.
@@johncitizen3361 Actually this one is a Bob Parker kit. See "Bob's" name etched onto the PC board. I thought it was a dick smith kit and referred to it as such and had to edit my dick smith comments out in editing once I saw "Bob" on the board, as this is a Bob Parker clone kit. Same thing, Dick Smith design, sold by Bob.
Did you ever notice that the chart is different on the MK-II version? Why? qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8900c3cb5ef2e93ed81a676b8718a444 In 2004 he said "• Front panel chart figures updated to reflect current-generation electrolytic capacitors." .. Hmmm .. which begs the question... which chart is correct? I have the same 1996 version as yours (Zilog has 9808 date code).
Neither chart is correct, because ESR is not a "pass/fail" value. For switchmode and other high frequency use, you need Low ESR, lower than the tables show. For audio or other applications, the caps could work fine even if ESR was far in excess of either table. So, the table is just an indicator, but has no relevance to what ESR is required for any particular circuit application.
@@johncoops6897 Yeah makes sense. I just had another look at both versions. Version I is labeled "worst case values" and version II is labeled "typical good reading". I gather that was the update / change.
@@techguy127com4 - I've found that most circuits will be quite stable even if some caps' ESR is way higher than it technically should be. In other words, when the circuits starts misbehaving and service is required, the ESR of relevant caps is literally "off the scale" compared to the figures printed on the ESR meter..
Also remember that many circuits use capacitors in parallel, which lowers the overall ESR enough to make the individual cap's ESR far less critical. A good example is PC Motherboards, which have 5, 10 or even more caps on the rails that supply the CPU - the PC will often still operate even when most of the caps have popped their lids LOL
@@johncoops6897 True! Being in the computer business for over 35 years I've seen just about everything from the very beginning, including reversed polarity electrolytics that exploded on the popular multi I/O boards that were used in all of the early 80's XT machines. They would blow in about 10 mins - loud snap, smoke and all. And although the "early" motherboards had their fair share of blown caps around the VRMs, it has easily been the PSUs that are far more troublesome right up to this day. I always laugh when I open them up and see the "VENT" brand caps - Yup, that's exactly what they did.. Lol :-)
@@johncoops6897 Thanks! That's a very accurate description. When ESR is high enough to make a circuit malfunction, it's usually way more than 10x the figure on the chart and often >99 ohms.
EA.....
Thats a NOP instruction.
The processor starts halted?
Weird.
EA = Electronics Australia, the magazine that published the kit.
@@Agent24Electronics That makes a lot more sense!
Which processor are you talking about? It's not the one in the ESR meter...
You should have charged your cheep boss every time you used it
Cheap boss paid me well. I was making 80k back in the 80s when the average worker was making 30.
We made a ton of cash then. Service dept was doing about 180k a year on labour charges and store was selling over a million a year in new stuff and this was a small shop, not a box box store.
@@12voltvids nice
DONT BUY THE ONES FROM THE COMPANY IN PORTUGAL! WHAT A NIGHTMARE! They shipped mine without any shielding for the IC and it was bad. They wouldn't do a damn thing to make it right.
Wonder how these sorts of meters compare to the cheap and cheerful Chinese testers available these days.
China tester is as good I would imagine.
@@12voltvids How does the Bob Parker one handle charged or partially charged caps? That's one of the weaknesses in many of the Chinese ones I've seen.
@@uK8cvPAq Did you not see the big note right above the test probe connectors that says "DISCHARGE CAPACITOR BEFORE TESTING"
@@12voltvids Nope, didn't see that.
uK8cvPAq Some versions of this meter have added input protection, at the expense of losing the ability to measure batteries. This is what Bob Parker says on the page below: “These ESR meters can generally handle being connected to capacitors charged to about 50V without damage, but like most other ESR meters they will be seriously damaged by being connected to such things as the main filter capacitor charged to 300V or more, of a 240V-powered switching power supply. Some versions of the EVB meter have extra protection as noted above.”
bobparker.net.au/esr_meter/evb-esr.htm