This has to be the simplest 'tester' ever and takes just a few minutes to make
You'll need to snip a known-good 'universal' extension-lead, then find another battery socket from your junk drawer... and a 5 volt buzzer.
This has to be a DC buzzer, not a piezo sounder. Piezo sounders need an external signal to drive them, more like a speaker. DC buzzers are very cheap off ebay. Then just copy the wiring in the photo. Note that the buzzer has pos & neg pins marked
The first check of a new extension-lead has to be by eye of course, ie that the neg, pos & signal are in the right order - black, red, white for Futaba or brown, red, orange if you're a JR/Spektrum user. As we've seen, a few leads have arrived with their wires reversed!
Once we've checked that the wires at both ends are in the right order, then we can try it on the 'tester'
What it does is to check for end to end conductivity of the plug, the socket and each of the 3 wires. Beep is good Silence is bad!
You can check for intermittent faults by jiggling & pulling the extension whilst its under test, making sure the beep doesnt get interrupted.
I've shown it with all the joints exposed - of course you'd insulate them with heatshrink.
You could make a boxed version, even have an internal battery (say 3x AA cells) which would last forever, and of course theres no need for a switch.
Cheers
Phil
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Easy-peasy extension lead tester
- Phil_G
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- Joined: 15 Feb 2018, 23:32
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