Pocket Sized Pen Style Digital Multimeter -- Workbench Wednesdays 01

Some of the Keysight handheld multimeters have a Bluetooth interface module and mobile phone app, which is handy for this, especially if you have to walk away from the device to power on some equipment (e.g. car troubleshooting). I think it also can speak out the measurements, but I can't remember if that was for the mobile app, or desktop app, one of them supported it. What is super-cool is that it allows for using the mobile processor to do calculations on-the-fly, e.g. automatically apply a maths conversion on the measured value (e.g. convert measured voltage to temperature, in real-time).

Nice review!

Interesting meter.. sometimes it really is awkward diverting eye-attention away from the location of the probes.

Another approach I've seen (for a scope not a DMM) was to have a bluetooth screen and hence use your own tablet or phone as the display.

Looks nice, but not a thing i'd use on a regular basis.

It would be intresting to see the keysight dc power analyzer on a future episode. The N6715C looks a very Intresting tool, especially for low power development

Hi James,

As I recall, there are some projects where they used an Arduino to output a wave file.

You could easily do this with an RPi over a wifi connection.

DAB

One application of the byte catcher would be to hack one of those inexpensive automobile backup assistance sensors (picture pasted below hopefully).

The output cable from its brain box to its display only has three pins.  So, my guess is that its using some sort of protocol to talk to the display versus just sending a voltage.  I may be wrong though.

My goal is to hack it with additional side detection features to "see" under other cars as you back out of crowded parking lots and to add blind spot detection while driving down the highway.

Of course, I could make my own from head to toe, but I genuinely like the stock option that is available.

-Sean

Interesting idea. My first thought was a WiFi module to have it read out by Alexa.

I don’t know of any standalone text to speech solutions. Any ideas?

I had a wild thought, to make the device more useful and compensate for the upside down display, maybe you could make it talk so the user does not need to look up to read the value.

Just a thought.

DAB

Good idea. I like the way you think! Any specific busses you'd like to see covered?

Hi James,

Great Presentation!

John