March 8, 2015, 6:07 pm
Electrometer is a piece of highly specialized electronic test equipment. Most of us would naturally associate it with low-level measurements (e.g. low current pA, fA and high resistance GΩ measurements) only, but the situations under which you might need to use an electrometer are actually far more common then you might have thought. In this post I will discuss a couple of situations where using an electrometer is crucial. And at the end of the post I included a video for some demonstrations. Continue reading ‘When to Use An Electrometer?’ »
June 1, 2014, 9:18 am
A few days ago, I bought a Keithley 197 sold as “unknown working condition” on the cheap. The seller said that some of the keys on the meter were unresponsive. I figured that I’d try fixing it if I could. After all, these 5 ½ meters still fetch well over $100 on eBay and for a fraction of that price, I was willing to give it a shot. Continue reading ‘Keithley 197 Teardown and Repair’ »
May 23, 2014, 4:48 pm
A while ago, I did a tear-down of a Keithley 196 bench multimeter. Towards the end of that post I showed a picture of my breadboard setup for backing up the firmware EPROM (27128) in case I needed to re-flash the firmware in the future. Since then, quite a few people had asked me to provide more details on how to do this using an Arduino. So I thought I would explain a little more here. Continue reading ‘Backup and Flash Firmware using Arduino’ »
January 28, 2013, 9:13 am
I bought a used Keithley 196 bench multimeter a few weeks ago. This is a 6 ½ digit 3,030,000 counts meter, capable of measuring voltages down to 100nV and currents as low as 100nA. It can also be used to measure low resistance with a resolution of 100 µΩ using 4-wire measurement. And because of the high input resistance on lower voltage ranges (> 1 GΩ), this meter is great for working with analog circuits where precision measurements are often required. Continue reading ‘Keithley 196 Firmware/Calibration Data Backup’ »