Like many hackers, [Matthias Wandel] has a penchant for measuring the world around him, and quantifying the goings-on in his home is a bit of a hobby. And so when it came time to sense the current ...

When measuring electrical current, the goal is to insert an ammeter in series with the circuit so that the current measured by the ammeter is identical to the current flowing through the circuit. In ...

Measuring current is always a nuisance because you have to break the circuit to put the measuring device in series with the circuit. That problem never goes away. Still, any high-end digital ...

Let's start with DC voltage, one of the simplest and most-used multimeter measurements. The DC voltage measurement is used to determine the difference in electrical potential between two points in a ...

To measure resistance, you usually have to take the resistor to be tested out of the circuit, and sometimes that’s impossible. If you’re using a multimeter, measuring very small resistances is ...

To measure a zener diode’s breakdown voltage, you need a dc voltage source whose voltage exceeds that of the zener voltage. In Figure 1, resistor R SER provides voltage drop between V IN and V ZEN. In ...

The simplest complete circuit is a piece of wire from one end of a battery to the other. An electric current can flow in the wire from one end of the battery to the other, but nothing useful happens.