On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 6:53:12 PM UTC-4, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article ,
says...

I think it would be nice to have a dedicated capacitor checker to verify everything.

I have a one of the mega328 Chinese component checkers and compared to a Sencore LC75, it's pretty close on capacitor values as long as the capacitors don't have any leakage. If there's any leakage, the values are skewed.. The other odd thing is that the 328 will return different results depending on what combination of terminals
1, 2, or 3 are used, which is odd.

Compared to the Sencore and an EDS88A ESR meter, the 328 component tester is good enough to trust with ESR.

The 328 is pretty good with resistances as long as it's over an ohm. Anything under an ohm is a waste of time. For low value resistors, I use one of my Fluke DMMs.

The 328 component tester is also not very accurate on inductances. For inductance, I use the Sencore LC75.



I don't usually worry about resistors under 1
ohm for a value. If they read short they are ok and if open then bad.
If I wanted an accurate ohm measurment under around 1 ohm I would use
the voltage and current test and calculate.


I work on a lot of current regulated power supplies where the source pin of a driver mosfet is grounded through a low value resistor of fractional ohms and tight tolerance. The voltage drop across it (or several in parallel arrangement for to get a value between standard values). A tenth of an ohm is the difference between a tightly regulated supply and a runaway.


I have thought about a quality capacitor checker, but do not do that
much that I need to do more than get into the ball park with them.

Then the component tester is good enough for what you need. They read value and they read ESR. They can't do leakage though. On rare occasions I've found caps that read fine for value and ESR, but those values change after charging them to their rated voltage.