In my previous blog post, I did a teardown of the EDC/Krohn-Hite MV216A DC voltage standard and measured the temperature coefficient of its reference Zener diode. And as I promised, this time I will explore its internal and external battery…
In this blog post, we are going to take a look at Electronic Development Corporation’s (EDC, acquired by Krohn-Hite in 1998) MV216A battery/external powered DC voltage standard and also measure its voltage reference’s temperature coefficient (tempco). A teardown video is…
A couple of months ago, I converted my EP200Mmd monochromator into a scanning monochromator and tested the spectrums of quite a few light sources. This time, I will take take a look at the spectrums of three cheap eBay laser…
Recently, I got my hands on TI‘s HDC1050 low power, high accuracy digital humidity/temperature sensor chip. The supply voltage of this chip can range between 2.7V and 5V, making it possible to interface with 5V MCUs such as Arduino directly.…
In my previous blog post, I discussed the basic TOF method for direct measurement of the speed of the light. In order to measure the time of flight accurately, we need to be able to both generate and detect very…
Speed of light c in air can be measured either directly or indirectly. There are many ways to infer c with indirect measurements. For instance, we can measure the propagation delay of a signal through a coaxial cable (or an…
Last week, I posted a YouTube video explaining how to use a function generator to test an unknown transformer. I have received quite a few questions since so I thought I would explain this topic a bit more in detail…
I bought this Keithley 706 scanner on eBay a while ago. This scanner can take up to ten different scanner cards and is typically used in an automated testing environment. In this blog post, I will show some of the…
A while ago, I saw a video on the signal path in which Shahriar modified his Verity EP200Mmd monochromator/detector and turned it into a scanning monochromator. Inspired by his work, I decided to do something similar. Since I do not…
LM2596 based step-down DC-DC converter modules can be bought on eBay quite cheaply for around a dollar each. But how do they perform? Is it safe to use it to power your design? Let’s find out.
This old Cisco switch was on its way to the dumpster at my work place, so I thought I would rescue it. After all, while there are plenty of teardowns of consumer grade networking gear on the internet, teardowns of…
In this blog post, I compared the rise time of four oscilloscope probes of various bandwidths using an avalanche pulse generator and a Tektronix 2465 300 MHz oscilloscope. The bandwidth of an oscilloscope probe is typically characterized using a network…
During the teardown of my Wavetek 859 pulse generator last week, I pretty much concluded that it was beyond economical repair since there definitely was something wrong with the main processor board. Well, after spending some time analyzing and troubleshooting…
In this blog post, let us take a look at a Wavetek 859 50 Mhz pulse generator. This pulse generator was made back in the 1980’s and has long been obsolete since. I got this unit next to nothing as…
As I mentioned previously, Amrel PPS-2322 (dual 32V/2A) does not have a fan controller so the fan is on whenever the power supply is on. The fan noise can become quite annoying and distracting. So I built a simple fan…