A short distraction from the Signal Generator project to make an LC Meter Shield!
It has been a considerable time since I posted. Blogging does not come naturally for me and I often prefer to just do things rather than write about them. I still haven't finished the Signal Generator although to be honest it is close....I am lacking motivation. I have pushed that project down a route which is no longer palatable...
Instead I have decided I will write about a small project that I made recently which works well and was great fun (for me) to make and build. I always need test equipment....it's a strange thing with Engineers...they need toys to make bigger toys!
In order to measure Capacitance and Inductance a piece of test equipment is often used called an LC Meter. This is a device which measures the amount of Henries an inductor has (Henries is the unit of inductance) or the amount of Farads in a capacitor (Farads is the unit of capacitance).
Inductor - an electronic component that stores energy for a short period of time by generating a magnetic field - normally made by making a coil of wire around a former. Sometimes special cores are used to improve the inductor's frequency response. Inductors are sometimes called chokes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductors
Capacitor - an electronic component that stores energy for a short period of time by producing an electrostatic field on two metal plates. The size of the plates and the distance between the plates changes the amount the of capacitance the component will have. The dielectric material between the plates also has an effect of the amount of capacitance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
I needed a way of verifying that the electronic components I bought or made are within the specifications I require! Component manufacturers print the nominal level of what the inductor or capacitor is but this varies considerably between batches and is often considerably off. Every good engineer needs a way of checking that parts are what they say they are...
There are plenty of hobbyist projects available on making an LC meter. This is my interpretation. If you do a search in google for 'LC meter circuit' several pages will be sourced immediatly.
I was directly inspired by Kerry Wong's blog post -
Kerry Wong's Blog about an LC Meter
There was also an article in Everyday Practical Electronics issue in March 2010 using a PIC Microcontroller.
I decided to make an LC Meter which uses the arduino shield form factor and is easy to make and use. I'm hoping people will like it and use it...although most electronics hobbyists I know nowadays are all digital and no analogue - ho hum!
Most LC meter instruments use a free running oscillator at a known frequency. When the user inserts the component in question in parallel with the oscilllator the frequency changes. By comparing the new frequency with the old frequency and using some mathematics the value for the component can be obtained.
So....how do we make an oscillator? There are several methods and I have discussed this in previous blog posts. This project uses a comparator to make a square wave oscillator. The circuit is below: