frantone patreon

Fun With Vintage Digital Meters!

🕑 Added 2019-11-29 02:41:03 +0000 UTC

Comments

Brendan Meteer

Fun! I have quite a bit of vintage test gear (including an old Triplett Model 1200) but no panel mount gear. I always enjoy your demos and teardowns of vintage parts.

Jessica McIntosh

Those are really awesome!

BobC

Mechanical pulse counters are still mandated today in some safety-critical applications for the simple reason that they preserve and continue to display their last value when power is removed. In some applications, neither redundant supplies nor a backup battery can provide the required persistence. The only current technology that even comes close is ePaper, and though it has some shortcomings, it is slowly gaining ground in such applications.

A day late, but my Thanksgiving is now complete; Family, Friends, a Thanksgiving Dinner that Can't be Beat, and a Brilliant New Video from FranLab. I love the old stuff, and this was a particular Joy, from the Window in the Styrofoam to the delightful discovery that the that the latter Counter was in reality a Voltmeter! Thank *you* Fran, very much!

Nicholas Wilson

It’s great to see you back, Fran. 😊

Happy Thanksgiving Fran x!

I bet both of those cost quite a bit back in the day... From a time when displays had a '+' sign as well as a '-' :o)

HarveyB

I'm fairly certain that the voltmeter is a dual slope integrator type. I designed and built one myself while a college student in the early 70's using TTL chips. The cool thing about the technique is that it can be done with digital and analog "jelly bean" components and doesn't require a specialized A to D chip.

HarveyB

The big 3.58 MHz crystal was very common at the time, and hence very cheap. Millions of them were made for use for the phase reference oscillators in Color TV's and because of their cost became the clock for a wide variety of devices.