Dear Reader, Sorry for the long delay. I was on vacation for the last few weeks. Before I left I assembled and brought up Revision G of the meter, which fixes the problems of Revision F (as detailed in my previous post here). RevG came together faster than any of the previous revisions. Starting after […]
RevF Hardware Bringup Report
Dear Reader, Here are some of the things that have happened in the last two weeks. New Enclosure Prototypes Custom connector mechanical samples On Revision E, which was in our promo video, the connectors were hand-cut out of brass tubing and soldered directly to the circuit board. This is a point of concern for manufacturability […]
RevF Assembly Pictures
Hi Reader, Just wanted to share some pictures of the assembly process for the RevF prototypes. All previous revisions have been assembled by hand with either a soldering iron or a paste dispenser. I swear by my Weller WES51 iron, but my paste dispenser tends to make a mess of all the finer pitch ICs […]
Revision F Prototype updates
Dear Reader – Here are some more updates about the Revision F (6th generation) prototype designs. These are the designs we’ll be pushing through the various regulatory processes that will allow us to manufacture and ship the Mooshimeter. SD Card and Reset Button Access On previous versions of the meter, the SD card has been […]
More retention features on enclosure
Hello Reader, Here’s another good idea from our backers – adding retention grooves to make strapping the meter to structures easier. So here are 4 notches appropriately sized for zip ties. Now you can more securely strap your Mooshimeter to just about anything! We’ll be 3D printing a few to get a feel for the […]
New Lanyard Loop and Enclosure Cleanup
Hello Reader, As our funding campaign is drawing to a close, we finally have a little more time to start polishing up our betas as we get ready for regulatory testing and mass manufacturing. I implemented some of the suggestions that have been coming in both from our friends at Dragon Innovation and from our […]
Quick Solar Panel Demo
Dear Reader, Far too often I’ve seen solar enthusiasts struggling with two-meter setups to try and calculate the true power output of their solar panels. Switching back and forth between two meters as clouds and trees occlude the panel makes getting a good reading very difficult! So here’s a quick demo of how easy the […]
Measuring Small Resistances in Live Circuits
Dear Reader, Brian Benchoff just posted about this demo on Hackaday (Thanks!), and we thought we should add some commentary. Usually to measure resistance, one must remove the resistive element from the circuit and connect the meter across it. Sometimes that’s impractical or impossible. If you know the voltage across an element and the current […]
Power Factor in a Blender
Dear Reader, Recently Eric posted an educational entry on Power Factor. To demonstrate some of the AC measurement capabilities of the Mooshimeter, I set up a quick demo to measure power factor and harmonic distortion in a kitchen blender. Like many blenders of a certain era, it has two “Major” settings – Low and High […]
Mooshimeter <-> Tessel
Dear Reader, We’ve been talking to our friends at Technical Machine about the possibilities of integrating the Mooshimeter with their flagship product, the Tessel. The Tessel is “Hardware for the Web” – it’s an ARM Cortex M3 with a wifi connection (through a CC3000) and expansion slots for a wide variety of sensor modules. The […]