Hi Welcome to the Eev Blog An Electronics Engineering Video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics Design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi It's product review time again. This time around, I've got an LCR meter. It's the Xtec.

Let me read this. 38193 That's my first complaint. Product numbers. What Is that? What's the deal? It's six-digit random number product number.

Give me a break, give it a decent name. Anyway, Xtec LCR Meter. Let's check it out. First up a quick rant about LCR meters.

Who needs one, right? Your regular multimeter can measure capacitance. can't it? Most can these days? No problem. but very few of them can actually measure inductance. And that's what an LCR meter can do.

LCR inductance, capacitance, and resistance. Sure, your multimeter can measure resistance no problem. But a good good LCR meter not only allows you to measure capacitance and inductance accurately, it allows you to measure other important parameters sometimes important for your circuits. is that, uh, the quality Factor dissipation Factor the ESR Etc of your component.

So really, you should have an LCR meter in your lab. Now this Xtec one is $9 so it's very reasonably priced. It's it's. in fact.

I'd say it's pretty darn cheap for what you get. It's one of the cheapest full function LCR meters on the market. Let's check out what you get in the Box. For 1999 Us bucks, you get the LCR meter.

Bonus! Uh, you get a crap looking manual folded paper thing I Don't particularly like it that much. It's got the specs and most things you need, but yeah, it's a bit crappy. Not bowled over by that. You get the CD software for the PC interface and you get the PC interface lead the optical lead so that's pretty good for the money.

I Think for them to, uh, throw in the optical uh, serial lead even if you don't ever use it, you've got it. Um, couple of standard standard 4 mm banana plug to crocodile clip leads as you'd expect. Um, but that's it. So yeah, uh, it'd be.

That's okay for the money, but it'd be nice if you got one of those uh SMD tweezer uh things these days cuz they're all the rage. I'm not sure if Xtech even offered that as an option for this meter actually, but it'd be nice if, uh, if you could at least get those SMD tweezers. So the headline specs of this thing. Well, it's about 7% uh, accurate on inductance and capacitance plus three counts by the way, which that isn't quite as good as some of the more expensive ones on the market, but this is a lower price point, so that's fine.

And it's It's pretty much all you need under 1% is is great. It's certainly much better than a a typical multimeter, which you know is going to measure capacitance to only a couple of percent. uh at best. It's got 20,000 count display, which is really good.

So it's basically a 4 and 1 half digit display, which is awesome. Um, it's got all the usual stuff you get on a typical LCR meter. It's got tolerance um uh mode. Not only does it measure LCR it's got a dual display uh which will go into it can measure quality Factor uh dissipation Factor ESR series and parallel modes You can change the frequency it only does 120 HZ or 1 khz I Was a bit disappointed by that.

Would have been nice if it went up to 10 khz. Uh, but it doesn't. It's got range hold relative high, low limit alarms, tolerance modes, um, all that sort of stuff. so it's it's.

not a bad meter. for the price, it looks like pretty good functionality for 199 us bucks. Okay, let's take a look at the meter up close. Now here it is.

As you can see, it's um, got a sort of a weird sort of functional uh angled. um I don't know. Look, it's got some sort of, you know, like it's some sort of industrial look I Don't know if I'm a big fan of the looks of it, but I Guess it either you love it or or you hate it I guess it's got some sort of you know styling with the ridges on the side like this, and anyway, eh, whatever. It comes in a nice looking um orange uh rubber holster which is uh, form fitted to it and as you can see it's got, um, a dual display.

The display is um, it's not the highest contrast I've uh seen, but they are nice big fat uh digits so it is quite readable. Um, and it's a it's completely dual display so you've got a primary display and a secondary display. The secondary display um can actually display your quality uh Factor it can display your series resistance, your dissipation. Factor So that's quite neat to have that secondary display up there.

And as you can see, it's got pretty much Um buttons for everything. It's got a keypad uh interface for enter in numbers. With the enter key, you got the power button which turns it off and on. Uh, you got basically a dedicated key for every function.

Now down here, you've got the blade input terminal so you can plug your components straight in which is great. Um, it's got Sted 4mm banana Jacks But the big thing that's missing is a guard terminal, a shield terminal which allows you to make up your own custom shielded leads which go off to test Jigs and things like that. So for really professional use, this probably isn't um, the best device out there. because uh, for really long leads that go off to test jigs in, uh, some sort of automated test environment in a lab or or a production line or something like that.

You really need that shielded guard terminal. But hey, for general purpose lab use, it's pretty good. So it it feels like a nice solid unit. it you know it feels like it really could survive the the band and the knocks.

But the the display. check. Check this out. The display is when you push one of these buttons up here.

Okay, the display is a little. it really I'm not sure if you can get that. There we go. The display.

um, just just pushing the buttons is enough to cause the display digits to actually, uh, fade in. so that's that's. not the best at all. and one of the most annoying features.

I'll start out with this: watch this: look. I'm pushing the buttons I'm pushing those really hard. Okay, I'm banging those. No response whatsoever because you've got to hold them down for like half a second before it will actually do anything.

It's useless. These buttons. Oh, they're hopess. They really need to look in into redesigning.

It's just a software thing. it's just a software timing thing. That's all it is. so that's really annoying.

One of the really annoying quirks of this meter. and on the top here, as you can see, it's got a 12v DC plug pack input. You don't get the plug pack so you're on your own there, but it does have the optical Rs232 uh interface which I said you get the lead for that so that's really quite neat. and on the back it's made in Taiwan There you go I Guess that's uh, different to made in China Go figure.

it's got a tiltin' bale. it's you know it's plastic, but it actually stands up it it. there's a nice angle on it and it stands up pretty well and you can push the buttons and and operate them without it falling over so it's not too bad at all. Um, when you do the sit it down on the on the bench, can you move it around? No.

it's got pretty good grip thanks to these two uh buttons up here. but there's no matching buttons down the bottom so the bottom tends to slide around a bit more than the top does. so they should have just added a couple of more buttons down there. but I don't mind it at all.

It sits on the bench nicely and it grips. It's pretty nice to use. There's one other thing that could be annoying if you're working in if you're using it at your cubicle or something like that in a quiet office environment. The beep is quite loud for the button presses, so that that trust you know that's hard to show up on camera, but that's reasonably loud I use that in the office and I feel a bit self-conscious really, but it's not too bad.

Um, it's got auto power off switch off cuz these are quite heavy on the battery. It's got a standard 9volt battery which I'll show you, but if you hold down the power button when you turn it on, it says APO off Auto Power Off function off So that disabled the auto power off and it's not displayed. There's no Apo in the top window. so if you want to leave it on um and cheer the battery forever, then uh, you have the option to do that which is quite good and also it uh.

One thing I really like is that it holds the last mode. Okay, we're in inductance mode at the moment. There we go: Henry's okay, we're measuring inductance and if you switch it off and switch it back on, it will come back to Millie Henry's mode. So let's go to Capacitance.

There we go. You switch it off and you switch it back on and it switches back to capacitors. Now that's not to be under underrated. That feature I Think it's really good because if you're measuring capacitors all the time, for example, you measure inductors all the time.

there. nothing worse than having to switch on the Lcmr meter each time and then go through the mode to get to the Uh to get to the function that you actually want. So Beauty I Like that. Now the 4 mm leads would come with it.

They seem quite reasonable quality. They seem a bit longer than your usual uh one, but they have a nice, a really nice solid sort of feel in there. and it's it. Feels like they're well fitted, they got lots of grip and they wiggle a bit, but um, yeah, it feels like you get very positive, uh, positive retention in there.

Now let's check out. One feature we need to check out is the Uh is the series resistance mode because see how things see how stable these things are. Okay, now this is in Ohms mode and as you can see, it goes down to 1 milliohm. Beautiful.

And as you can see I wiggle the sockets around, even to 1 milliohm, you can see that even when I wiggle those sockets, it doesn't change at all. so that is really quite stable. I Like it. It's excellent and if you choose the relative function, you can zero that out there.

you go and that measures down to 1 milliohm easily. Piece of cake. Okay now let's do a basic test with a simple 470 microfarad electrolytic Uh cap. Now I've got it in capacitance mode.

here. it's Auto ranging. You can manual range with the range switch, but we won't do that. We want to test the Auto Range you know I've got 120.

HZ is my measurement frequency. The secondary display I've got uh I'm measuring the ESR so it's got Ohms. There's a little Ohm indicator up there as you can see and we're in series uh measurement mode. So let's plug the capacitor in it.

plugs in these blade terminals are quite nice. They seem fairly, um, fairly, make good fairly good contact, and as you can see it, uh, it takes a little while on the auto ranging, but it's no slower than other meters on the market. And as you can see, the My 470 Microfarad Cap is 541.401 That uh .24 up there. you all you got to do is switch into series resistance mode and there it is.

275 Ohms for the series resistance of that capacitor at 120 HZ And if you want to change the frequency, you can do that. The frequency up there at 1 khz is .121 So as you can see, the frequency makes a hell of a difference. Now, normally the ESR of a capacitor is measured at 100 KZ is the nominal Uh figure for that, but um, uh, this one only allows you to go to either select 120 HZ or 1 KZ which is a bit disappointing. I Would have liked to have seen, at least say a 10 khz mode, but for the price, you can't complain.

It works really well and it does have a backlight feature. There's AO the hold button down here. You hold it down for 2 seconds and Bingo! the backlight comes on. It's a green backlight.

It's pretty weak. Trust me, that's not the camera. It's a pretty weak, piss weak looking backlight. I Don't like it, but hey, at least it's there and it's probably not drawing too much current.

We might measure that later. What are the minimum values? It can measure well in capacitance mode at 1 khz, you always go to the highest frequency when you want to measure the uh, lowest uh possible values. Um, it's 0.1 Paa Farads I'm a bit disappointed with that. It would have been really nice to go to Um 0.01 Paa Farads resolution, but hey, you know for the price, it's not too bad.

um uh ohms of course you saw it went down to 1 milliohm before so we won't do that again. And if we short it out, the inductance as you can see goes down to 0.1 microhenry. Now if we change the frequency there, 120 HZ You see it's only one microhenry so you got to go to that 1 khz range to get uh, your low your greatest resolution value .1 Micr Henry That's okay. Uh, once again, I Would like to see a bit more than that, but for the price, not too bad at all.

Now as you can see there .1 Uh Paa farads .1 microhenry and 1 milliohm resolution really blows away a standard multimeter. Even if they do have LCR capabilities in your multimeter, these things are much more valuable. A dedicated LCR meter is much more valuable. uh for measuring uh, small values of components which you typically might find in say, RF work or something like that.

So real. Handy To have one of these LCR meters in addition to your regular multimeter and it's got uh, regular Minmax average recording functionality as well. So in any mode, you can just hit the min max record and it says R up there. So we're actually recording now so you can actually take a value and it will beep when it's found there we go.

It's probably found the upper value, but it doesn't Auto Range It won't actually switch uh ranges while you're in that recording mode. There we go. it's just recorded the minimum. so now we can hit the min max button.

There's our maximum value 107k our minimum value .k It didn't switch ranges which is a bit disappointing. Um, and the average Min minus Max and the a bloody buttons I hate them. uh and the average value 53k. So there you go.

There's one really annoying feature: I Don't like I'm in the tolerance mode here. Entering the tolerance value: it's a little bit complicated, but look, the power button does not work when you're in this entry mode. It you cannot switch it off. You've got to finish doing the entry mode before you can turn the power off.

That's crazy I Won't spend the time going through and uh showing all the other Uh modes that it has like the um, high low limit alarms and the tolerance. It's got quite flexible tolerance modes where you can uh enter values and get the difference from an entered value and stuff like that which really is quite flexible, but I won't spend the time. You can have a look at the Uh manual which uh tells you all about that, but it's pretty flexible unit. I Like it.

Now here's the meter without the rubber holster on it and I noticed a weird uh uh sound inside there. like a twanging sound. It goes twang anytime you hit it. I'll hold it up to the mic and see if I can get it.

Listen to this, see that. So it's obviously some. like a there's like a metal internal shielding spring or something like that inside or some, um, extra shielding in in there that's just, uh, loose and it's just going twing. Now there's one slightly annoying thing about this because it doesn't have a very long battery life.

You have to take the holster off to access the battery compartment. I Find that a bit annoying, but it's not too bad. I Guess now they've got uh, two screws here for the battery compartment for the 9vol battery and two screws up here to open the case. So let's take a look.

Battery compartment uses uh standard self Tapper screws. It's not too bad. They're the good quality type. but look, how do you get this battery compartment open? It's one of these.

There's nothing to sort of, uh, get your finger nail under or your finger under and lift out. You got to sort of pop it open like that and it's really quite annoying. But anyway, here's the uh. here's the 9volt battery.

They give you a Mitsubishi uh, 9volt battery with it I don't even think it's alkaline, so that's a bit cheap ass. and it's just got a standard 9volt battery snap, which um, yeah, I'm not a big fan of. It's one of the cheap quality ones, but hey, you know at least it's it's accessible but not as accessible as I'd like. And to get the case open, they've got the standard self tappers here same as these ones and but there's none none down the bottom.

Uh, this bottom battery cover screw actually holds in the case. so let's open it up. I've fed the uh battery snap through there. so if you want to get the case completely open, you have to feed that battery snap through.

But there it is. And as you can see, there's that metal work. There's that uh, metal work that was going Twang And let's take a closeup view of the board. Shall we? Here it is.

and I'll take you all the way along the The construction is very, very nice. I like it. It's uh, it really is. um, quite a decent quality.

There is on the joints there. there's some solder residue. There's some paste residue there on all the pins as you can see, so that's not too great. but um, uh, but that's uh, not uncommon.

really. In uh, these sort of uh, uh, you know, leadfree construction instruments and stuff. There's a TLC Let's see if we can see that there's a TLC 713 5. um I'm not sure that's a TI part.

I'm not exactly sure what that does. It's probably an ADC I would uh, suspect given the big Uh sampling cap next to it here. I would say that's the ADC but I'd have to check on that. Um, no surprises whatsoever.

It's a TI MSP uh, 430. Not sure if you can get that up there, but yeah, there it is. TI MSP 430 processor. Um, they've got a code in here.

It's a Zeon a Zeon to I'm not sure what that actually uh means. it's probably the code name for the actual Uh product. Now down here is the ISP programming. Header By the looks of it, um Comm And then they've got TX Uh, no, there's Tck there.

It is. Tck down the bottom. That's probably the Uh JTAG interface for the Um for actually programming the device so that's readily uh, accessible. A few SMD electrolytics down here, but pretty much much all um.

standard. Jelly Bean component stuff I Really like it? Um, but that's fairly common for these class of Um LCR meter instruments. Now let's take a look at the input. Jacks here.

They're very nice. They're actually uh, folded metal like that and they go down through the bottom of the board and then they're bent back up on the bottom of the board and soldered at both points there and there. And they're They're really quite nice. I like them.

and as you can see a spare fuse, look at that. they've given you uh, a spare fuse which is quite thoughtful. And there's the input fuse there. There's a poly switch there.

It is a PTC poly switch so it's got some input protection and it does tell you if the fuse blows, the firware can actually detect that the fuse is blowing. It will actually display fuse up on the screen. There's a little uh trim pot there. um, but that trim pot looks like the only adjustment.

and there's a jumper switch here which says Cal that's obviously move the jumper switch up over to there you put into calibration mode. Uh, but apart from that um, we've got the uh input um board here. that's got the Um RS 232 Optical interface plus the 12vt power supply and voltage regulator up there. This is tacked on.

look, that's a bit bodgy they' that's a surface mount footprint there and they've just tacked that on. That's that's pretty rough as guts I Don't like it. So overall, the construction quality is uh, reasonable. They really do need to work on their cleaning process for the board.

uh cuz there's lots of left over a residue on there I don't really like that is there's the odd dodgy uh cap in there. you know, the wires over to the to the Um piso transducer over there. a bit bodged on and delicate and you know, but it's okay. It's a reasonable construction quality for the price.

I Don't mind it really. and because the manual doesn't give us the battery uh specs at all the battery life or anything like that, let's check it out. I Got the Metro hit extra here. measuring the battery current as you can see I've got in stand it's drawing about 18 microamps and the Metr hit world over.

Here is measuring the battery voltage which is 9 volts coming from my uh power supply over there. So it's on standby mode 18 microamps which is pretty darn good. That's going to last a couple of years on standby mode, so that's quite low. So let's switch it on and as you can see, it draws about almost 12 mamps.

Um, during normal operation. does that change during Uh modes? No. Seems pretty consistent between the modes. So let's turn the backlight on and it almost doubles there cuz it's a really beat weak backlight.

so it's only drawing about 10 milliamps extra for the back for the backlight which isn't too bad, but 12 milliamps? uh, power consumption. That's probably going to give roughly H 50 hours of uh, regular operation at at least I'd say around 50 hours I don't think it'll make 100, but it should do around 50 hours so that's not too bad. Now there's one more thing we need to check is what value uh, battery voltage does it drop out at Now the battery symbol will come up in the bottom corner here. So let's wind the wick down on our external power supply until it comes up.

Oh, there we go. about 7.4 Vols which isn't that great? That's only about 1.2 V Vols per cell for our 9V battery. Um, which I' I've seen worse than that. but I've certainly SE a lot better and it should be a lot better.

Um, so they are pissing away quite a bit of the power in the 9V battery so it may not get that 50 hours. um, uh, battery life we were talking about I don't know you'd um, uh, have to actually do a fullterm uh test on that to make sure. But yeah, I' rate that as a little bit on the Poor Side Really? Now I won't bore you with all the details about how it seems to meet the specs on all the components I measured in all the ranges and things like that. so we won't bother.

But I'll just do a quick test here with the surface mount inductor at 1 khz and this does compare well within spec to other Uh LCR meters. I've got 1,55 micr Henri's um, let's have a look at 2.6 Ohms series resistance. Let's go in there and uh, change that. There we go.

Almost 2.6 Ohms series resistance at 1 khz. So let's just, uh, confirm that with our uh regular meter here at Uh DC And there we go. 2.5 Ohm. so that's not too far off at all.

and I just thought I'd see if I could confuse it by putting another 10 Ohm resistor in series with it and there it is. Uh, 12.6 Ohms. No problems at all. Switch it through to micro Henry's it's still there and it's uh, but it's showing a series resistance of there you go.

12.5 Ohms, No problems at all. And if we switch that over to our meter over here a regular multimeter, there it is 12.4 Ohms, No problems. And just for fun, let's see how good the shielding is. I'm on a call here.

Let's do the standard mobile phone test, shall we? That Uh, you can pretty much test for all sorts instruments. so I'm actually calling. so this is transmitting and it's it's doing nothing at all. Check it out.

really nice. I like it and let's just do the same test again with the leads attached. No problems at at all. It doesn't change a thing.

One thing you have to consider with these LCR meters are the specs. Now the specs of its basic um accuracy spec of 7% plus three digits is only going to be met in the middle ranges. Um, and this is the same for almost every LCR meter on the market. So just look out.

Check up here. This is a 10 mad, uh range of of capacitance at 120 Herz it's 5% plus uh, 5 counts and once again on the lower range. Down here it goes up to 1% plus 5 counts and it really only meets its basic spec of 7 + 3 um in the center of the ranges. And there's the capacitance at one.

uh kohtz. there's your inductance and it changes with frequency. So and it'll change with um, series or parallel mode as well. so it's just something to look out for so it'll only meet its basic specs pretty much in the middle.

Just something to consider. Um, when you're looking at LCR meters, if you're comparing the specs of them, make sure you just compare the specs in the outline ranges as well. and watch for those uh plus counts too. Let's have a quick look at the software that comes with it.

Now when you install it from the CD that you get with it. Uh, it installs the National Instruments Lab view runtime driver so we'll have to install that. Uh, before we can talk to the meter. Okay, we started up and we get the Xte instruments here.

it's called the virtual Meter. So let's start the instrument and well we just get some silly looking uh uh well nothing. Please check comport parameter. no nothing.

Zip can't automatically connect Set comp Port Here we go. Com 2 let's try com one shall we? and set instrument save to default. Okay and there we go. Boom, it's talked.

Yeah, it's loading and bingo there it is. It switched modes. It was measuring Capac before so it automatically switched to inductance. Let's see if we can if it reflects up here.

Yep, it does. So there you go. and let's go from parallel to serial mode. Yeah, parallel mode.

It does reflect all that. it. it's not displaying the secondary reading up here. I Don't know why it's not doing that.

Check it out. Let's switch back to series mode. There you go. It displays that, but it doesn't like displaying that secondary value up there.

I'm not sure what's happening with that and let's check out this record. functional. It looks like you can actually uh, plug values in here. so I'll plug a bunch of different caps in there and as you can see, it updates in real time there and I'll hit record and it looks like it's recorded a value there.

Let's try another capacitor. They're all the same, but they will have slightly different values of course. And let's record that there you go. I Was actually able to call a list a spreadsheet list of the values I Actually recorded? Uh, there's the five values.

There was four dummy values before it, but uh, you can actually export that to an Excel compatible uh spreadsheet file so you can get the data out. Um, I'm not sure if you can actually, uh, write your own software. It comes with a dev kit to, um, actually talk to the protocol to suck your own data out automatically as part of an automated production test or something like that. Um, I'm sure it's possible, but uh, I didn't uh, see anything in the software that actually allows me to do that? So it's got basic rudimentary recording capability and and duplication of the Um actual instrument you can't actually record.

Uh, you can't actually control the instrument from here by the looks of it. Um, but you can actually, uh, get the readings out of it. so it's okay, but nothing to write home about. So there's a quick look at the Xtec 3801 193 LCR meter.

It's only an entrylevel model, so you got to look at it from a price point of view. Uh, it's $199 which I think is pretty excellent value for money. It's not that much more expensive than some of the other simpler um El Cheo one Hung Low brand LCR meters out there, so it's pretty good. It's only got 12 month warranty Um, so you know it's not going to shake the Earth there, but it's reasonably accurate.

It's not the most accurate LCR meter. uh, out of the LCR meters I've got here, but it's certainly the most affordable, so you got to look at it from that afford Ility point of view. and I think it really is pretty good value for money for an entry level LCR meter. for your bench, it reads pretty stable.

It reads fairly accurately compared to my other uh LCR meters out there. and I don't mind it. It's got a few annoying features which bug me the buttons. The auto ranging is fairly slow on it, but it seems to work and it seems to work pretty well for 199 us bucks I think you should take a look at it I like it.