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Distinguish Donovan of HomeAdditionPlus.com reviews a high voltage electrical circuit tester and a digital multimeter electrical circuit tester for use ...

GFCI circuit testers?

Oct 17, 2006 by Shawn T | Posted in Other - Electronics

Does any one positive the inner workings of a plug in style circuit tester with GFCI test? Epecially the GFCI proof portion.

I conceive of that it contains a high value resistor between the hot terminal and the safety ground to simulate a minimal in the air leakage and trip the GFCI.

WK

what causes electrical outlets to become hot to the touch and trip circuit breakers..kitchen area?

Aug 22, 2006 by tom.pris.4344@verizon.net | Posted in Decorating & Remodeling

this is remodel industry and several outlets have been added and now they are overheating with use...even if only one outlet is being used. If more than one counter top appliance is being used it will trip a circuit breaker. The outlets are very hot to the give rise to retouch..we have stopped using all of them until we come up with a solution to prevent a fire hazard......circuit testers show wiring ok (the yellow ones with the lights.

they are shorting out, or you are placing too much of a weight on the circuit.

What the heck are you running on the outlet that exceeds 10 or 15 amps?

How to create an Integrated Circuit tester?

Aug 11, 2007 by J3F 4 3V3R | Posted in Programming & Design

I wanted to produce an Integrated Circuit tester, which are capable for detecting the wires circuitry inside it... is it possible to develop it in a simple breadboard layout which can be connected to the COM port of a PC then interface it using VB Programming? If is it possible how can I act as if it what are the things i needed to work with ?

Yes, but it would be a main pain undertaking.

If it for only for one specific digital IC, you would:
1) use an LPT (parallel) port, or build a serializer/deserializer for a COM anchorage.
2) hard wire the power and ground pins to a power supply that you would have to build.
3) provide optically eremitical input AND output circuits for each of the port's data pins and circuitry to control the ride herd on hint at according to the port's R/W pin. (optical isolatation reduces problems related to electrical devastation and ground loop issues.)
4) attach each input pin to the output of a latch/flipflop or whatever.
5) attach each production pin to the input of a tristate driver.
6) provide a latched multiplexor attached to multi-bit latch to 'whereabouts' the input of each 'input' latch/flipflop and the enable pin for each tristate driver.
7) tie the inputs of the multiplexor latches to 'some' of the seaport data circuits, tie the mux input and all of the tristated outputs to another of the port data circuits. Tie the mux latch pin to a passage driven by another port data circuit and an additional isolation circuit to the ports write strobe.

I probably forgot something (or a lot) but that should be almost on the hardware side. If you want to be able to handle more than one specific IC, you would need to rewire the I/O ports for each IC *OR* provide i/o circuits for all i/o pins and add addressable circuitry to facilitate/disable the drivers to each pin via software. This would require careful consideration to prevent damaging the IC by driving an busy output pin.
Build and test very carefully or you will burn out your circuits, or even your computer (probably just the port, requiring proper a new motherboard)

And that is just for the Hardware side!!!

On the software side, you will want an real-time operating system (Windows is not even inseparable) and an understanding of realtime programming (not too bad on a real time OS) *OR* just be prepared to disable all of the interrupts on the computer and "go commando" with your Windows system.

You will have to see how to use and program the port hardware. This is done at 2 different levels. First, read the IEEE 1284 Parallel Refuge Standard and understand that your particular hardware may not handle all of the modes. ECP will probably be there and do what you need. Second, find out what refuge hardware is actually in your machine, and how to set it up for whatever IEEE1284 modes you are going to use. Write the software to set up and wield the port I/O and its timing (the OS or language libraries might handle this for you, but do not expect it, good luck) I spent months column just this part for one OS company several years ago. It was all done is assembly and getting the timing within spec was a major pain, even with my access to the underlying OS. However, since you are communicating with your own circuitry, through one definite setup of port hardware, you could fudge most of the timing specs.

Finally, you must write the application straightforward with software to set and query the individual pins on the IC and store the results to whatever time resolution you feel is requisite. This probably the easiest part of the whole project.
If you have a strong understanding of circuit design and low-level programming, you could probably get something just working in much less than one man-year. If you have to learn circuit design and/or low-level programming, or if you want a fairly robust decipherment it would probably take much more than one man-year.

I used "man-year" as a measure because if you get a friend to do the design and set up the circuit, and another to do the port handler programming, and you work on the IC query software, all at the same time, the elapsed time might only be a few months. (You could then do it again in a few weeks)

If all of this sounds daunting, materialize that devices to do this well and safely are sold for thousands of dollars. I have done most of the pieces in the past and I would not want to do it unless someone paid me a hurry off.