Stupid debugging tricks

[dachshund]

I recently bought a neat looking volt meter, a panel-mount type, thinking this would be cool to add to a tester I'm going to build. I just built the BSIAB2 and wanted to check DC voltages. "Hey, I'll use my new volt meter!"

What an idiot. It loads down the circuit (or something), so it doesn't read DC volts correctly. I spent half a day staring at the perfboard, scratching my head. A simple voltage divider registered 0 volts. I finally used my multimeter, and realized my fancy panel meter was the problem.

The good news is that the circuit works!

[petemoore]

  yeap.
  I use comparator in those situations.
  Different ways of finding...whatever it is the meter don't wanna read right.
  I'll grab a marked resistor of...the resistance it won't measure accurately, see what the meter says about that, then I have a 'reference number' and can put the meter to the points I want' measured and see how those numbers compare.
  Other things like that.
  IIRC somehow I used a second cheep meter to compare something...I forget the application now, most of the time there's some kind of work-around...but no replacement for a reliable, accurate meter.