These ESR meters were not a planned project. I was given a bunch of PCB’s by my dad so I could test capacitors in circuit in old CRT’s and computers. Pair that with finding the last of the multimeter style LCD’s at Jaycar and I had to make them up.

PCBs

The PCB’s came from some old projects online. The PDF’s and programming files can be found here.

Building them up and issues

Most builds were straight forward, some of the chips weren’t overly easy to come across. The two issues that plagued the builds were:
– The LCD based unit had a faulty PCB and a suspected short through the ground plane. Transfering all the parts over to a new PCB got it all working fine
– The 7 Segment based units were easy enough as well except I got the ICL display chip in backwards misreading the silkscreen, after that all 3 of them fired up into life.

The Probes were a bit of a pain. I opted to only get 1 set of proper probes as they are $18 per pair.

Final Products

I finally got to use up these really old cases I had on hand, they actually fit the 7 segment displays perfectly. They just needed a bit ( a lot ) of trimming.