Building capacitance and inductance meter

Capacitor and inductor are like brother and sister. They both are reactive components with somewhat similar characteristics. Like any other electronics component you need to know its value before putting in to circuit. Capacitors are a bit easier as they are pretty good labeled. Inductors are different story. Some of them are labeled, but what if you want to make your own – then you can calculate its value (what is not always so easy) or measure. Most multimeters come with capacitance meters, but only few have inductance measuring option. BasinStreetDesign from instructables decided to build capacitance/inductance meter that would be accurate enough for his daily use. He considered several measuring methods including resonance, time constant and impedance. Resonance seemed to be most accurate. Measuring frequency and calculating component value definitely involved microcontroller that he wanted to avoid. Interesting thing is that he used UV erasable PIC microcontroller. Most of young hobbyists probably never seen this before. So the project got some smell of retro. Anyway further journey took everything to AVR. He had some struggle by setting things up… Continue reading