On 11 Nov 2008 16:43:04 GMT, (Andrew
Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
Grimly Curmudgeon writes:
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember T i m saying
something like:

I'm looking for one of those little panel meters to be used for
monitoring the charge / discharge rate on my garage solar lighting
system please [1] (around a tenner would be fine).

http://tinyurl.com/5ez266

And shunt it.

I did something similar many years ago, building a sort of
poor man's UPS. I had an old 50uA movement, and the shunt
was to simply connect the two terminals to the battery lead
about 30cm apart. A bit of experimentation was necessary to
get the calibration to match the meter scale.

I did similar with a DVM on my electric racing 'motorbike'. So many
inches of the main battery feed cable gave me enough volts to feed the
meter via a trimmer and to be able to calibrate it easily.

I opened the meter up and changed the zero setting, so it
became a 5-0-20 ammeter.

Very specialised. ;-)

You have to be very careful opening
moving coil uAmmeters though -- sort of need a clean room
mentality as they're very susceptable to tiny dust particles
getting in and making the movement stick, especially anything
magnetic.

I bet!

Well, I'll keep that idea in mind if I can't find anything off the
shelf.

Cheers, T i m