Hi. As promised, we're going to take a look at my new BK Precision 8601 DC Electronic lower. This is an upgrade to my 8500 electronic load. Very similar sort of beast, but this is the new of Whiz-bang model so thank you very much BK Precision for sending in.

This replacement model is very handy now. This new 8600 series comes in a huge range of models. This is like the second from the bottom. so this is 120 volt, 60 amp 250 watt model and it's roughly equivalent to the old 8500 I've got here.

It's also 120 volt at, but it's only 30 amps. It's a very similar look and feel between the two, but quite significant changes in upgrades on this one that I am gonna find most welcome I'm sure. And the first one you'll see is that it's got sorry I turned it on before taking it apart. Whoops! We've got a jewel line our dot-matrix vacuum fluorescent display, whereas before we had the pretty rudimentary 7-segment vacuum fluorescent.

Well, it's a 14 segment vacuum fluorescent display on there and it was pretty limiting and rather annoying. so this one's much nicer. And right off the bat here, you can see we've got greater resolution. Look at this.

We've got point one milli volts resolution on this puppy. We only had 10 millivolts resolution before on this one. same current resolution at 1 milliampere, but both of them are actually capable of going down to naught point 1 milli amps resolution presumably for the serial or the comms interface. And this one's a little bit more expensive about 1,100 U.s.

dollars that street price for this one, which is, you know, a lot, but it's a really good DC electronic load they are available. the Itec A brand are affiliated with BK Precision, so I believe you can buy the similar unit under the Eye Tech brand. but beware I believe there are fake Eye Tech brand ones on eBay that's what I'm led to believe anyway. so just beware.

you're getting a genuine unit. Very similar keypad interface, but a couple of more keys instead. It's got the enter key here for example and the buttons light up. It shows you which mode you're in constant Carom this one didn't look, you boot the thing up, you don't even know what mode you're in.

it's just it's crazy. This one's much nicer and a separate shift button over here, so user interface vastly improved which is so welcome. It's got the same excellent knob that we had before no worries. and it's got the same big beefy binding posts on it.

but I as I've mentioned before, I would actually prefer to have four millimeter banana jacks as well as the big binding post. That would be really nice, but yeah, it just sort of forces you to make up some custom leads if you want to hook up banana plugs to them. A little bit annoying, but wah big and beefy. Yeah, and both of them have a temperature-controlled fan in it, but the new model is practically silent.

The other one had a little bit of a harm in it. This one's even better. nice, but of course that's going to change once you start dissipating. A fair bit of power in this thing and you really get a lot more bang per buck on the back.

Check it out! We've got a current monitor output I Believe that ones are isolated. You've got a more versatile external interface here. Yes, it does that remote sensing just like before, but it's got it. Had the Rs-232 control before.

it's still got that. It's got a separate remote control as well as USB and good old GPIB as well. Whereas before you had to use the whirl, you could get a separate option or what serial to USB interface. So much noise appeal.

You'll notice this one has the fan on the back here. this one I can't remember. We've done a teardown of it I think the fans internal or something. It's got Joule heat sinks either side here, so it'll be interesting to see.

there could be substantial physical differences inside. In fact, there has to be I Mean, you know, look where the main socket is so you know, like that unless the what A wires go somewhere else or something like that. But yeah, anyway. I Think we're going to see a complete redesign in this thing.

Let's have a quick look at the data sheets between the two. Oh Lincoln Being down below for those who want to check them out as I said look, they come in different art styles. big huge, beefy rackmount things. fantastic although I'm you know my needs don't extend that far.

So the desktop unit is fantastic. The old one also did similar sort of things. But and they've both got the usual work modes: constant current, constant voltage, constant resistance, constant power as well. But the transient performance is much better.

Apparently it's got a new faster processor in it. Consult and go up to 25 kilohertz in constant current mode for the transient, whereas before it. just yeah. transient mode Another big improvement.

Adjustable slew rating Constant current mode I Don't believe the original one had that. fantastic. And you see me use the building battery test function before I Believe it's got additional capability over the old one. Fantast! the old one was very rudimentary, although it's still I believe only does and powers measurement would have been nice to do what hours as well.

That's interesting. It's got a voltage fault pin on the output as well. Gonna have to have a look at that one. Hmm, maybe not in this video, but and they can operate down to fairly low voltages too, which is important.

You know you're measuring the battery discharge that curve, you know you want to go down to that 0.8 volts for Alkaline Zoar Even lower I've gone down to I think in some of my tests for the real low power ones, down to like 0.1 volt or well under that. but yeah, it changes with current here. they've got the various curse. it's neither here nor there over the previous one.

I Don't think, but this is interesting. Look, it's got an LED load mode, right? So it simulates the the curve of a typical LED with a a resistance region as well. I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to do it, you just wouldn't. You just run the actual LED and stick it in a box if you didn't want the light coming out? I Don't know, but anyway, um, could be handy for some people.

It's novel anyway, and it's got very flexible transient operation. As I said, much faster than before. You've got adjustable slew rates, fantastic and automated test modes and things like that. It's got, you know, much more capability than the previous model on that one.

and this sort of stuff is really useful for simulating products under test or measuring batteries. For example, because batteries often will do like pulse load testing and stuff like that, you can saut ematic alee, switch between two loads and measure. Fantastic. and as you saw, much more versatile comms interface as well.

got GPIB the USB and Skippy commands terrific stuff external triggering and voltage latch operations specifically formed battery another power source. You can have a switch on and off particular levels fantastic and the battery test function supposed to be more powerful. The applications software. it looks better than the old one, so yeah.

I'm keen to try that out because that was a big gripe I had with the previous one the supplied software. It it sucked. It really did So yeah I hope they've improved that. Yeah, the adjustable aren't slew rate function anywhere from one milliamp per milli second up to what 2.5 amps per microsecond depending on the model and you know things like that.

Not sure this. welcome to look Building Rise Time measurement This is rather fascinating. It allows you to measure rise time of power supplies because that's one of the primary purposes of an electronic load is to measure power supplies have not not just bench power supplies, but you have DC to DC converters your design and building to your products and things like that. and it can do rise in full time measurements without having to get an oscilloscope like this.

So that's rather interesting, huh? and can just display on the screen or in the one instrument. Neat. Although yeah, you'd want to build up confidence in that before you use it. I'd be double-checking there against the scope.

and of course you want the scope you want to be able to check. You know you want to actually see the waveform and of course document it and things like that. But yeah, I don't know. That could be really useful for some people and it says it can actually be used as a timer as well for timing how long you've had the thing I'm enabled that's great I Never really thought of that for the previous model, but yeah I can see where that would be handy.

And the new one specifically actually has the spec for a write minimum input for each point one eight volts at 6 amps. That's pretty good It I goes up to that one point 1 volt SPECT a full-scale spec at 16 hours. but G's point when I Very nice. They haven't really changed the accuracy between 0.05 percent typical you know, which is absolutely superb.

Thing is like a precision meter in its own right. and of course with the remote voltage sensing as well. You can really utilize that voltage accuracy and minimize any drop or and completely eliminate drop in your test leads. Now I won't go into the specs a huge amount you can read for yourself in the datasheet.

Suffice it to say that much more stuff is specified. transient mode and everything down here. They didn't specify any of that before. Look, that was basically all you got before this was.

you know these are for the different type models. that's just for the one model, the 8500 there and you can see, but this one has everything specified. Fantastic. Much better, but it doesn't end there.

it actually extends onto a second page and it does look the read back power of the rebut current, read back, voice, the protection range, all sorts of general stuff. It's much more comprehensively. SPECT I Love that here they are side by side the old 8500. I've done a teardown off before which I'll link in shown it's probably comprehensive as much to buy.

Tear downs are and this will probably be much shorter. Just highlight any differences between the two the 8500 series and the new 8600 series that is very similar the thought before. Obviously they've shared a lot of stuff in here and the physical differences are going to change depending on the model you select. So this one here was a 300 watt model and they used to separate heat sinks here.

a total of four. but what a total of eight power transistors? Sorry, this one is a 250 watt model. single heatsink. It's got ten power transistors in it.

I'll show you up close very shortly, but um, yeah there is. There's lots of attention to detail in here that make this a real high quality unit and I'll point out a couple of features if you have a look at the old model with the binding post interface, it's just absolutely gorgeous. Everything's locked. Hide it up.

They've got specific custom bars going over to the PCB here and very similar on the new one. Check it out. A few differences, but yeah, very nice jewel art not tied down here. the bar that directly comes out from here or custom machined or custom-made it is.

gorgeous. Interface: exactly what you want on a real high quality high current unit like this thing. and they've upgraded the transformer. this is the old model and spot the difference.

Here's the new model extra shielding beauty I'll just show you those input binding posts again and the connection to the PCB because it's just gorgeous. Look at that. Wow And there's our main current shunt. There's actually four of those in parallel, so they need that to get the power dissipation in this thing.

And this fan actually sucks in. so they've got your fan one to suck it right through and then out the other end. But our power transistors are also tied into this heatsink as well. so it's getting rid of the power from not only the input shunt and current shunt, but the power transistors, which is actually the load.

This is where all the power is dissipated. and is it good enough for 250 watts? Yeah. Seems reasonable. And then main power transistors down there.

Genuine, international rectifier. No one hung. low. gray market rubbish.

IRF P250 ends and these are designed to be easily parallel connected as well, which is what they've got here. They've got five on each side I won't take out the other boards to show you, but they've got five on one side of the heatsink, five on the other. Total of ten of these things. So they're really, you know, spreading the head around.

This is real good safe design practice to spread and then using big Teo 247 packages as well. much lower Junction to case thermal resistance and you Wimpy little lot to-220 s. So yeah, really, they're doing this right. And these big wirewound resistors here, obviously the parallel shearing resistors just to equalize the load across all the transistors.

nicely connected. earth connection down there to the board as well. Look at that and got the Loctite on it. Beauty.

You can see that the older design used us some through-hole stuff there. just op Amp's TLO Eight Fours classics. so you know, Obviously based on a much older design and it looks like they've beefed up some of their linear regulation around here. This is the old model and check out the new one There it is over there.

You can see that everything's got a Heatsink. It's much bigger beefier although I got a little bit. I'm not a fan. this is the mains cable.

It's just like running over the top of the board there. That's like that's a real shame like that. You know, why not route that properly like they've routed? You know they've put attention to detail and everything else. I Mean, look at even the head as they put silastic on the headers to hold him in place.

although why you wouldn't use latching ones? I'm not entirely sure, but anyway, they've gone to that effort. but that's the mains input cable just lying on top of the board. Oh, that's like the only thing I can fault with this. You'll see that there's a fair bit more miscellaneous analog stuff all going on around here in the new design compared to the old one, which was, you know, not not as much happening.

And yeah, they rub the bloody numbers off. And there's where the extra grunt comes from: Stm32 F103, Arm Cortex M3 processor. So that one's the one that must be doing all of the calculations. because this is not an analogue unit.

as such, it's its digital. All the control happens digital. So to do implement the constant power, the constant current, constant resistance, everything else modes. it needs to do it all in software fast DAC and ADC and especially do the transients and stuff like that.

That's when the switching. that's how it's doing it. in the STM processor, there's a little out error. Cpl D They're just taking care of business.

Seriously. BK Precision. Nobody gives a toss what you're using - for your GPIB control. I Give me a break.

There's an Atmel arm to handle all the other row comms interfaces, the USB and all the serial stuff. They've built a new dedicated secondary board to do all that and check out the mains input section. Beautiful. Look at this.

They've done it properly. Shake proof, washer properly crimped and heat shrunk and everything. For the earth connection, they they haven't. just you know, split it off from here.

They've actually dual connected down to the one point. of course you know I'm a big fan of the power rod. look at that. although it does stick out the front of the case a bit too much.

Not happy with that. But yeah, look, there puts elastic on the main mains. Parry out, but that's it. What? Like I said.

That's really my only gripe here is that this is kind of well. I I actually pushed it across the circuitry before I Believe When I opened, it was like, you know, going over the heat sinks and everything here. but now that should be routed better than that, you know, down the side of the case or something. but you know, minor.

just the mains input voltage switching. They've got more protection there and nice common mode. Chokin It's doing the business. Nice low voltage isolation slots excellent and of course there's all your digital isolation going over to your main interface board up the top here.

So all of the all the control circuitry and everything else is that the same ground potential as the input and there's where all the measurement magic happens. that's an Analogue Devices Ad 76 82 pulsar ADC 16-bit job and you're pretty decent converter. You can see right next to that there's the voltage reference that's a maximum mark 60 to 50. yeah, pretty common for this type application.

good enough and over. from that there's no deck look. Ah good old Brown. Love it! Anyway, it's the DAC 88 31 once again matching 16-bit DAC and this particular one has as opposed to the 88 30 I think it is has a Kelvin connection for the reference so there's just additional connection flexibility in that chip to wire it up to eliminate a connection errors or to minimize them.

And no device of this quality of course would be complete without temperature sensing the heatsink. That's what they're doing there with that bracket, they're just holding a Yachty O 92 package temperature sensor straight on to the heatsink. they're they only need do it on one side, they don't need to do it on the other side for the power transistors because the thermal resistance of and big aluminium heatsink like this is bugger-all. you can see the other five match in power transistors on the other side just tucked away in there.

Also with their art ballast resistors as well. and I was wrong about this current monitor being isolated output I Assumed it was isolated because it was using the isolation ring around there. that's just isolating it from Mains Earth. but well, it is isolated from Mains Earth which is good, but it is actually connected tada down to your reference to your negative input there.

so just be aware of that when you're connecting it up to a measurement system and the display board on the front I won't bore you with the details. Very similar our design and placement to the previous one. Once again, they got silastic down here and as I said before it, not sure why they didn't use the latching headers in there again, but you need more room for the latch in header so maybe that's why they did that. But yeah, it's just going to be upgraded.

Its capability to drive the dual line matrix are vacuum fluorescent display so there you go. There's the internals of it. Just as good a quality as the previous model, yet no worries, it's built to a high standard. A high quality instrument should last a long time.

Excellent. You know you can barely fold it. That means wiring in there just flapped around in the breeze. That was really my only major complaint, but they really are designed and manufactured to quite a high standard.

These BK precision nut loads. maybe not quite up there with you know, the key sights of the world, but G's not far off. Really decent quality and whether or not they're good bang per buck compared to the you know, the cheapest you can get on. eBay Well you know I think that the performance is going to be there with these.

These expect much better designed and built better so you know, but they're not that cheap but you get what you pay for. So yeah, I really think they're decent value for the money. They Really are. And you get a traceable calibration certificate as well with all the measured values.

Beauty. and you don't get this with it, but it's an optional tail. PWR 1/2 meter 60 amp test lead with Spade connectors Oh Oh just feeeeel Uh. silicone.

Oh, these leads are gorgeous. Oh excuse me? I'm gonna go in the corner and just fondle them. and I Really like the setup in this thing. If you're in constant current mode, for example, just go shift setup here and you get all the stuff.

You can set your range. You can set your high threshold voltage you see it low and you can set your slope rate as well. Check it out. Five events per microsecond? That's the up You know when it rises back up to compensate and when it falls down, you can actually set that rule.

And of course you can. when you're in constant voltage. It will give you different settings for your different ranges so we can go into constant power here and there we go. There's a constant power high, low nice, and battery modes just a bit nicer to use.

I'm not sure if it actually has any greater can function LM Just off the top of my head from last time we used it. Anyway, you can set the stop voltage like this. Hang on. Yep, you can set the stop capacity if you wanted to stop.

otherwise you just press zero and it just ignores that. you can actually time it. Have a safety timeout as well, but you can just put enter if you don't like that and Bingo! It'll show you the current power plus your accumulated and power capacity over here and the time you've been going. Very nice.

Like I said, it would have been very nice if you could have a constant power as well and get I Don't think it does. Let's we're in constant power mode. They're going to battery and sorry. Stop capacity.

Stop timer. Bingo! it's still in amp hours. It's not in what else. Would have been really nice to have a water our capacity as well, but you can ultimately do that in the software.

You just can't do it built into the instrument. A bit of a shame, but yeah. and if you go into the configuration here, you can set various stuff like and set the protection. for example, it's going to have a look, look at maximum power, maximum current, etc at maximum time so that you can actually just have a you know set these things so that you can't damage your product under test.

Very neat and measurement mode. Let's go in and take a look at that voltage range time filter as well. Very nice. Don't know how to go back so I'll just cheat there.

There's our LED load mode and you can do a switch remote sensing as well so if we switch remote sense on, it should display that on the display. Now should tell us since there it is. Yep, and here's something: I Always dread the software side of instruments because it's always crap. The previous BK Precision Software was crap and I had high hopes for this one.

And if you go into documents and software here it is operating software. you know, no problems. It even includes the LabVIEW runtime engine which presumably you need to actually run this thing and it's got. So it's got operating software and it's got battery test software as well, either with or without the runtime engine.

So you install it with the runtime engine. Now installed the battery test software and you load it up and it looks like this. It looks better than what we had before. Okay, pretty funky.

We can do a discharge test, a charge test, or a sequence test program. So you're going to discharge tests here. and here's the screen. we get.

it all looks great. Okay and I was getting nothing up here. I've connected to via the USB port and I was getting absolutely nothing from this drop down list here. I didn't even get there.

did it - do you know Windows thing when you plug in the USB It did. it just did absolutely nothing. Now the granted: if you go in here and you read this USB TMC which is test measurement thing installation note then it tells you that you need to install Ok the Ni Visa driver. Ok now I downloaded that.

It took me like an hour. It's like a 650 Meg download or something and I installed that and I actually got after I installed that I Did get these two drop-down boxes here with the Com1 and the Lpt1 Lpt parallel port. Give me a break Anyway, it's there for all the legacy stuff. It's an Ni thing.

National Instruments think Anyway, after I installed the huge massive Visa driver I get these but I still I I can't connect the default 4800 or whatever it did, nothing connects I still don't get the digit to do windows thing when I plug in the USB like oh now of course this could easily be a peb kak error, right? problem exists between keyboard and chair ie. me but like even a dummy like me should be able to just load the bloody software, plug in the USB and work. I Got the existing USB to serial converter cable that came with my existing previous 8500 BK precision load and I'm using that that doesn't come standard with this. It's got USB built in.

You're not supposed to be able to use it anyway. I load that up and it installed. sure enough. Comm 6.

So if I connect if I popped up because it's a you adjust a USB serial art converter it. Nope. So I can see the serial port but I cannot connect 215 K board I don't know what the baud rate is but like I can see the serial port but it just ain't connecting. Oh I Hate crappy software that doesn't just work.

Is it too much to ask really? well. It turns out you've got to go into the system menu and go into the communication settings. A By default, it was on Rs-232 see which I didn't see. Anyway, there's a specific setting for USB TMC so presumably I've got to select that before it'll even identify this thing.

Okay, Bingo! I'm in there. that's in the communication scene now. what's in the protocol? Skippy? Okay, great, that's fine. Okay, we want Skippy commands and so let's see now if I can connect with my damn USB Yeah there it is.

It looks like it actually enables the USB Hardware inside this thing as I said it wouldn't even do the did it did it Windows thing when you identification when you plug it in but now it did once I enabled that in the software. presumably it powered up the USB did whether its circuitry did whatever it need to do. there it is USB test and measurement device I VI ready to use. Now it's probably going to use so is it a pig? CAC Probably There we go.

Hey we've got it. It looks like we might now be able to talk but like seriously like what a pain my anti and des downloading the software I don't think would have worked I needed the National Instruments driver I like I didn't even get a CD in the box. it's a 600 Meg download like I don't know. Anyway, connect here we go.

Yay we're in when like okay you know it's obvious once you know but like out of the box just a pain in the butt. Sure it didn't take me long to figure that out, but yeah now this battery discharge test her. it does look like it is better. more functional than the other one, but still.

it doesn't have basic functionality like constant power discharge to get what hours look this charge you can get. You can never set a discharge current or the discharge see rate but you know either way it's you can set your discharge current so you know, not 0.1 amps, hundred milliamps or whatever and what if you want what our that's just. come on, you know it's not comprehensive enough. It's okay if you just you know it's great if you just want amp hours.

but if you want what hours which is the true measure of battery capacity then well, it doesn't cut the mustard. you'd have to do it manually. I'm going to set up like a 50 milli ampere discharge here I've got a little Cr2032 battery hooked up I think it's new and I'm just kind of like that's way over its capability. 50 milliamps shouldn't discharge it at that.

but anyway I just thought I'd try it. So let's give that a bow so we can set the dropout voltage to say you know, 2 point 6 volts or something like that. So let's give that a bill and start. Presumably, let's go.

It's starting. Yeah, you can switch on/off the remote sense as well. Switch that off hello I press Start I'd Expect data to start automatically appearing on the graph and be automatically not. Let me go check the unit.

Alright, looks like it head down here for the interval it had by default zero. So I'm gonna set it to one second and let's see what happens if we set it to one second. interval. start.

Nope. Okay, so let's just try that again. I've restarted everything and well, when in doubt, have you tried turn off and on. So it's start and bingo.

Something's happening yet the voltage dropped right back right down. of course. Immediately there you go, it's dropped down at two point three. So I don't Didn't set the threshold this time because it's it.

would have just cut off instantly there before I got to the first first second. So well, was that the problem? I don't know. Anyway, Um, there you go. We're getting our battery discharge curve.

So yeah, it's working. Okay, no worries. Um, yeah. As I said, it's a bit from memory.

It's a lot better looking than the previous software, but it still has the same limitations and things like that. And I can export the data. can I export the data. There we go.

I can export to a clipboard? No worries. but the auto scale like X doesn't work on this one like it's just it's just broken like Y You know it's just dumb I don't know what's you know? there's no like yeah, stupid stupid, not happy. Okay, it's got various these various measurement things and stuff like that. Okay, can you zoom into that Museum into that? There we go.

No, it just reset back. Yep, you are capacity. Why is it got a maximum capacity of 0.1 amp hours? I don't know. Did we set that anywhere? No, we didn't set that.

It should have. Like why doesn't X or TOEIC scale work I don't know. it's just yeah. still a little bit clunky, but it works there.

It is all right. let's install the just the generic 8600 software I don't know what it does, but it's only 6 min load. By the way, if you don't get the runtime stuff with it, which is quite nice. so let me let me run this again.

Sorry, it's on my other screen I'm not capturing that. That's it to my B Here we go: MDL it's loading up Windows has blocked it Here we go. Borma MDL Series 80, 600 series. That's what we want.

Demo: No Want to connect here? We go. Can we connect? here? We go. Yep, we can connect Bingo voltage. There we go.

We can see my battery connected to it. No worries. Okay, great waveform recording. Alright.

Transient operation. That's all right. There we go. Transient: Constant current, Constant power, Constant voltage, Constant resistance.

That's alright. Alright, so the main software is a bit better, but you're basically just operating it remotely. You know you can do all this stuff on the front panel except our waveform recording of course, so it looks like yep, you can start everything else. you can start and stop just fine.

Input offer on short offer on a remote sense offer on Okay, we've got our virtual knob there Oh enable overcurrent protection blah blah blah Hardware Power limit on the light side. Yeah, okay, and it still it's a bit. Dicky Anyway, look, we can save a list. No, that's that's there.

That's a program list. Okay, but once again, like waveform recording. Okay, we can get this waveform. Okay, but how do we like? You can't extract it.

How do you save it? I Can't see it. Crazy. Okay, so here we go: I'm in constant current mode I've set it to ten milliamps down here. Type that in and I can turn my input off or on.

Okay, you can see I've already tested that the battery voltage is increasing back up here because I loaded it down with Ten Milliamps, which is quite a substantial load for a here Cr2032 battery. And if I load it down you can instantly see it drops down to two point seven volts. This is probably not a brand new, freshy and well, yeah, whoopty-doo Waveform recording: Start Here we go and maybe we can just see it drop There we go. starting to give it a few Wiggles in there and start to drop.

Okay, that's not as exciting as it was before. So what I'll do is I'll go back to here so you can operate different parts of those. so let it go back up. Okay, and if we go down to here: waveform recording I assume it clears the window.

export out of the clipboard, export data to Excel Okay, exports simplified image so like oh, come on PNG give me a bitmap EPS Enhanced Metafile Come on, Geez, just a PNG thank you very much. Anyway, if we go now, if we just go start, so let's clear the chart and then we start recording. Okay, so there's no battery voltage and if we just oh no, we can't go back over. see, we can't go back over.

Ah, so how do we supposed to know I've got to run over and switch the thing on I Had to hit the local button on there. Here we go. I did hit the local button and it's still doing it. So I it's annoying.

Okay, you want to start recording and then switch the damn and put on like that's just. it's crazy. This software's so clunky and here's what happens if I exit right, click on there and export or copy the data to the clipboard and then paste it into what notepad. It's giving me the tabular based stuff like that, so that's alright.

Don't save I can't export data to Excel maybe after I Stop I can. So there we go. Stop. But I still haven't stopped my input I don't want to go back to the main screen? look I'm why can't I export my data to Excel? That's just ridiculous.

Uh, export out of the clipboard. So if I call up my spreadsheet and I paste that data in here we go. I can paste it. It's automatically.

Yep, it's yeah. yeah. tab. it's automatically detected that it's tabbed.

Okay I can paste it into Excel That's fine. Okay, but anyway, clunky software I I Don't want to test anything else I'm done on the software. It's just. it's just jazzed up a bit prettier than before.

yeah hardware I Really like really nice electronic load if you're after one, but you know ya don't expect the software to do much. but the whole idea I guess is that? Yeah, they do have a programming guy which comes with this thing. If you go over here to the manual, where is that? They've got the programming manual here so you can download that and it tells you you know all the Skippy commands and everything else so it's fully documented. So if you want to write your own software which isn't hard, of course, you know it's got LabVIEW drivers and everything else.

so you can really put together our programs. you know, pretty quickly, so it's really super flexible so that's great. Look at that. No worries, that's excellent.

Okay, so what I'm gonna do now is just do a simple transient operation. constant current, transient. Nothing fancy at all. I like a fancy pantsy constant power.

I'm gonna switch between say, two amps here and not point two amps here and just one second. I just default one-second intervals between them and trigger to start. Bingo There we go 60 watts down to zero. Boom every second.

it. it's doing the business beauty and it looks like we can start and log this at the same time so we can start logging that. so we turn off input. and yeah, now I've got its sequence in between two amps and naught point to em.

So like how it tells you the number of our transitions up here. That's very nice. But what? I've actually done done is gone in there and can I disable this local constant? Yep, local off. it's all right.

I've already captured it. local, alumax, lie shift setup and I've gone in there and actually changed the the slew rate. I've gone to the low rate and I've actually changed at a nought point. Oh one amps per milliseconds.

so 10 milliamps per milli second slope time for rise in for but like I Thought this would work when you press the on-off button like just manually on the theme, but it doesn't. It still does it instantly. when you go off on that, it looks like the rise in full time I stand to be corrected if there's an option to do it, but it only works in that sequence programming mode we were just doing and that's a bit disappointing. I Would have liked to learn to just do the button, but anyway, if we go up here and have a look at our waveform, there we go.

you can see I captured that and you can see that it actually ramps over that time. there. There we go, a hundred. It takes 200 milliseconds there to actually do the rise and fall.

So that's exactly what you'd expect. 200 milliseconds if we're Well, what we've done is programmed it to be ten milliamps per milliseconds. So yeah, it's bang on. It works.

but as I said, only in that sequencing mode not with the on/off mm-hmm So there you go. That's a look at the new BK Precision 8601 electronic load and it's a decent step up from my old 8500 model. I Really like it. This mixture of flexibility, extra resolution, much more faster operation.

Have a real performance tested In terms of you know it's faster route, transition times, and all that sort of stuff, but it looks like it has some quite useful extra functionality. And before you had to buy the previous USB cable, now it's all built in. But yeah, as always, the included software is a bit. You know it leaves a bit to be desired.

I'm not going to write home about it, but ultimately it does work and you can make it do most things that are required. But ultimately, a lot of the applications that this load is going to be used for are going to be custom applications. custom development. So really easy to write your own software to actually drive this thing and do precisely what you want cuz the hardware's capable of doing an awful lot, which the software doesn't look like it can take complete advantage of it.

For example, constant constant power mode for battery test. So if you're really doing comprehensive battery testing, the included application might not be enough, but it's enough to maybe get you up and running. but a lot of people who's going to write their own software, so that's all hunky-dory It's all documented and it's a really great, well-built supply. So I think it's that decent value for money if you're after a good quality supply load, it's an electronic load, not a supply, so they know it's really quite nice.

I Like it, thank you very much. BK Precision Links will be down below. as always high res teardown photos at Eevblog dot-com they'll be linked down below as well. and after this I'll be linking some videos some other videos I've done on things like this is a you might want to watch catch you next time.

What's needed is an electronic load that you can just dial up whatever load you need to test out your power supply and I thought it's about time I probably built one. So I thought I would get some junk box components see what I had lying around and lash one up. And here's the result. Let's go through it.

So what's needed for a simple electronic load? Well basically an electronic load is just a constant current sink.