Electronics Project #2: Teardown of Homemade Continuity Tester | In The Lab With Jay Jay

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Silly Job Title: Grounding Genius

Old Book: Industrial Electronics Reference Book by Electronics Engineers of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation published 1948 with 680 pages.

Today we teardown a homemade continuity tester which I put together for use before I had a multimeter, so that was in the early days of my new lab, circa August 2021.

While I was preparing the links for this blog post I discovered that the plastic case I used for the continuity tester was the HB5610 Black Hand-held Electronic Enclosure from Jaycar. I purchased one of these for AU$9.95 back in August 2021, which was around the time that I made this continuity tester.

I subsequently purchased a ten pack of similar plastic cases from AliExpress for AU$64.55 (inc shipping) in March 2022. I went to find the AliExpress listing so I could link you to it, but it’s an old listing and has been taken down. I did search for an equivalent product but didn’t find what I was looking for. The dimensions are roughly 70mm x 135mm x 24mm and there is a facility for 2x AA batteries built in.

The multimeters I use/mention in this video are:

The multimeter I mention I want to get is this one: EEVblog 121GW Multimeter.

What I say in the video about active vs passive piezoelectric buzzers is correct. The active buzzer will do the buzzing for you, all you need to do is supply some power. The passive buzzer will need an input signal in addition to power, so some sort of oscillator if you want to generate a tone.

I knocked up a schematic for this continuity tester, something like this:

Continuity tester schematic

I’m gonna try getting some PCBs made for this circuit from PCBWay, because I’m still trying to learn everything I can about that process!

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe!


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

FNIRSI M328 Component TesterThis is an image of the product.

Let’s go shopping!

Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire

I don’t believe I am autistic, but I have a few friends who are on the spectrum, and I am occasionally assumed to be based on the manner of my expression (it’s an occupational hazard I suppose). Anyway I did have some interest in reading Dave Plummer‘s book Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I know about Autism, ASD, and Asperger’s that I wish I’d known back then… This is just another one of those things on my very long list of things I would very much like to read but for which I just don’t have the time.

ATmega fuse bytes

A quick search for arduino fuses programming turned up a bunch of results:

New segment for In The Lab With Jay Jay videos

A while back now I had the good fortune to pick up Silicon Chip‘s library of old books. I didn’t get *all* of them, but I did get quite a lot.

I was thinking that as part of my In The Lab With Jay Jay videos, in future, I will tell you about one of these old books during the introduction to the video.

More chromium woes

Man my chromium browser has been giving me a lot of grief lately. Two times so far I needed to reboot to fix the problem. This is the third time and rebooting is always such a hassle. :(

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Thu Nov 23 20:20:54 [bash:5.2.15 jobs:0 error:0 time:0]
jj5@charisma:/home/jj5
$ chromium 
[1123/202056.945777:ERROR:elf_dynamic_array_reader.h(64)] tag not found
[1123/202056.945823:ERROR:elf_dynamic_array_reader.h(64)] tag not found
Trace/breakpoint trap (core dumped)
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