The most common reasons that modern digital electronics devices fail seem to be a bad electrolytic capacitors. Bad electrolytic capacitors cause frequent failures of switch mode power supplies. It seems power supplies are often the weakest link in many modern electronics devices. Since there is tremendous price pressure on PC’s and other consumer electronics devices, →
A floating measurement reads the voltage between two points, neither of which is at ground potential. A most typical floating measurement done quite often is when doing voltage measurements with a battery powered multimeter. The floating insulated multimeter allows doing floating measurements of slowly changing signals easily. The advent of switching power supplies and motor →
Multimeters are very good tools to find out problems in electronics circuits and testing electronics components. Resistor measurement is found in practically all multimeters, capacitance measurement range is becoming more and more common and some high-end models can also measure inductance. Many multimeters have also possiblity to test bipolar transistors (Hfe measurement range), but I →
Here is one useful trick I invented when looking around the transformers/power supplies I had. NOKIA ACP-7 Europe Standard Charger (Original) has a specification of 230 V, 50 Hz, 4.8 VA. Output 3.7 V, 355 mA. A normal 1W white LED is driven with 350 mA maximum continuous current and typically 3-3.8V voltage drop over →