PCBite: Measure Hands-Free on Your PCB

If (like most electronics buffs) you only have two hands with ten fingers on each, but lots of measurements to make on your boards, here is an interesting gadget for you. It’s the missing link between crocodile clip and contact point. It allows you to measure, continuously, hands free, with contact points without mechanical attachment, held in place by a flexible gooseneck arm. The probes are interchangeable and the support is very stable.

A new test of PCBite filmed by Roger, an Elektor reader who checks if this accessory lives up to its promises. Does it give reliable, hands-free measurements without mechanical linkage, held firmly in place by gooseneck arms? Do the befits of this accessory justify investing in it? The answer to these questions is set out in this video from Kainka Labs.

In the past, every electronics technician in his (hobby) lab had a function generator with an XR2206, but those days are long gone. Nowadays such a generator works with a DDS chip that generates frequencies digitally. Unfortunately, a decent DDS function generator isn't really cheap — or is it? The JOY-iT DDS function generator promises a wide frequency range and many possibilities at a low price.

Suppose you want to measure a slowly-varying voltage from a sensor, or perhaps plot the discharge curve of a battery. Is it really necessary to sit there and note down a reading from the multimeter every so many seconds or minutes? It is less tedious and much more elegant to use this Arduino-based unit connected to your oscilloscope. Two questions motivated Kurt Schuster at the beginning of this project: ‘is my battery any good?’ and ‘is this charger charging my battery correctly?’

All that’s required to measure radiation is a simple PIN photodiode and a suitable preamplifier circuit. We present here an optimised preamplifier and a microcontroller-based counter. The microcontroller takes care of measuring time and pulse rate, displaying the result in counts per minute.The device we describe can be used with different sensors to measure gamma and alpha radiation. It is particularly suitable for long-term measurements and for examining weakly radioactive samples.

It seems that to even dip your feet in the ocean of DSP (digital signal processing) you need lots of SMD soldering skills and a ton of math. Seems. Let’s end the anxiety: here is a Universal Audio DSP board for the DIYer. Based on the Analog Devices ADAU1701 DSP, this board has only through-hole components—except for the DSP itself.

To make accurate voltages measurements you need an A/D converter (ADC) chip which has good resolution. The folks at Elektor Labs have developed a board containing a four-channel 16-bit ADC. It’s no coincidence the board uses a Gnublin/EEC connector which makes it compatible with the Elektor’s Linux board, Xmega Webserver and the new Extension shield for Arduino. A universal C library is included to make integration a walk in the park.

Oscilloscopes are the primary measurement tools used today by engineers to test and characterize their power supply designs. The R&S®RTx-K36 frequency response analysis (Bode plot) option provides a low-cost alternative to low frequency network analyzers or dedicated stand- alone frequency analyzers.

Looking at today’s world of electronics, a handful of topics dominate the headlines. These include digitization, artificial intelligence, electrification of transport, autonomous driving, renewable energies and 5G, the next generation of mobile radio. From a higher perspective, they are all interconnected in some way.

Did you know your oscilloscope’s effective number of bits (ENOB) is just as important as the number of ADC bits? ADC bits is one of the most widely known specifications and many engineers rely on this as the sole specification that determines an oscilloscope’s quality. However, the importance of ADC bits is often exaggerated while other critical indications of signal integrity get pushed to the background. In this free whitepaper you learn about the major impacts ENOB has on your measurements.