Mini Breadboard Prototyping Voltmeter
Mini LCD Voltmeter Kit provides on-breadboard voltage feedback at a glance.
When prototyping electronics, it’s hard to beat the versatility and speed of a breadboard. If you need to take measurements, you’ll need to add probe wires and tie up a multimeter and/or oscilloscope until the task is done. This is usually fine, but EEtackle has a different solution for prototyping: the Mini LCD Voltmeter Kit, which attaches to the breadboard itself.
The voltmeter, which has a footprint of just 0.9 x 0.7 inches, and is 0.25 inches thick, plugs into a breadboard as a semi-permanent display for voltages of 3-33V DC. Just connect the line that you need to be measured, along with voltage and ground, and you can see what’s going on at a glance without poking around with your scope/meter probes.
The STM8L152C6T6-powered device draws only 700µ (i.e. less than a milliamp) when in use, and requires a supply voltage of between 3-45 VDC (though it can reportedly run down to 2 VDC as needed). This allows it to be used with just about any prototyping project, and it won’t draw too much power unless you’re going for extreme efficiency.
The tiny voltmeter ships with an example metering program installed, but users may need to calibrate the device to account for component variations. Additionally, the device does not feature any reverse polarity (or other) protection onboard, so it really needs to be hooked up correctly. On the other hand, the device sells for $11.99 as of this writing, so you could pick up a few to see multiple voltages at once, and/or to account for potential future mistakes!
