AVR Component Tester Review

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• published: 23 Mar 2015
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I finally gave in and bought one of the AVR component testers from eBay. Here is a quick review of some of its capabilities EDIT:- I was not aware of this devices origins at the time of posting the video and was correctly informed by one of my viewers (Thanks) about that. I agree with the viewers sentiment and as such I have added the following credits to the actual designer and any QDOS given in the video is rightfully his/hers. FISH8840 is a vendor making a clone of it and selling on eBay, it may have some modifications from the original and that's cool as it is open source after all but it does clearly state on the www.mikrocontroller.net web site that this design is NOT for commercial use and requires permission from the author prior to using commercially. I have no idea if that did or did not happen. As I said I'm not getting into that debate on this channel The Original project for this tester was the open source "Markus Transistortester", see here for details:- http://www.mikrocontroller.net/svnbrowser/transistortester/Doku/trunk/pdftex/english/ and I have to say it is an AWESOME product and is still in development with new features and you should checkout the above link and show some support even if you go the route of the clones as there is a wealth of detail on this site for upgrades, use and troubleshooting. and much of that can be applied to the clones as well. I am not about to get into a debate about buying Chinese Product from eBay, but I am more than happy to give credit to the originator of the design where I am aware of the facts, hence this edit. END EDIT: I found the tester to be excellent at identifying components and providing accurate readings for most of the types of component i tried For most results this was within 1 or 2 percent and on resistance as good as 0.5% or better. That's not bad for a 20$ component tester based on an Atmel ATMEGA328 with a few resistors, transistors and other discreet components It easily handed Resistors from sub 1 ohm to 1M ohm and it can identify even wider range than that Capacitors, Inductors and Diodes including Zeners where a breeze FETS, MOSFETS, BJTs both N and P channel and also identifying Darlington's was as simple as pressing one button on the unit (The other button is for turning it off ) You can find this unit on eBay or you can build your own, just search for AVR transistor tester or "Markus Transistortester" and it will appear, there are many variations based on the same software with a few cosmetic differences between them. This will certainly be a useful tool on my lab bench, well worth the money even at twice the price and I will be watching the Markus Transistortester web site for updates