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Short circuit testing on the Mastech

A project log for Silly hardware wishlist

Too simple for a project page & which may never happen.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 12/14/2018 at 00:240 Comments

It was replaced by an Agilent for 2 years, but now it's back.  It suffered 2 problems: very imprecise settings & no short circuit test.  Its mane good points were very high power, easily restores its previous settings when turned on.  The Agilent ran into its 1A limit quite easily & required a complicated menu navigation to restore previous settings.  

Short circuit switches instantly welded themselves closed.  The easiest solution ended up being bullet connectors.  They don't expose the + side like a knife switch would.  The male connector is naturally - although it might have been better as GND.  They make a nasty arc when testing 30V, but don't weld closed.  

In a pinch, the bullet connectors could be a parallel output for the banana plugs. Lions have never needed more than 2 power supplies, though.

It's a bad day when a power supply only has 0.1V precision, even then with a lot of nudging.  The current limit can't get any more precise than 0.3A on the left while the right has 0.1A precision.  

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