Winning

Remember that multimeter I was so excited about a few months ago? It’s the one that uses your smartphone as the display. Well, I used its best two features within a week. First, my car was having trouble starting. We had a cold snap, so it was a good bet the battery had died. However, no one wanted to come into the garage with me to crank the engine while I watched the battery voltage on the multimeter. You know, something about it being below zero and not wanting to put boots on.

Well that’s NO PROBLEM because I hooked up the meter to the battery and watched my smart phone as I got in the car myself and cranked the engine. Or didn’t, because the battery voltage dropped to 7V as soon as I opened the door. When the headlights are on “auto” and you open the door, the computer checks to see how dark it is and then turns them on if needed. That was enough to show the battery was dead.

But wait, there’s more! I later needed to see if using batteries to power a desktop gadget I was building was viable. I thought the batteries would be dead in about a day and a half. So I slipped an SD card into the meter and had it log the current through the device as I went to bed. The meter has no problem itself with batteries. It’ll sit there logging for months on 2 AA’s. The gadget design will have to wait for another post.