This post is part of my video blog: In The Lab With Jay Jay.
Silly Job Title: Electron Herder
This video is a teardown of the ALKOY Capacitor Discharge Pen which I did for YouTube user t1d100 who asked me about it over here: Demo of the ALKOY Capacitor Discharge Pen | In The Lab With Jay Jay.
I made a bunch of mistakes while making this video, so please bear with me. I tried to add some captions to explain things when I went wrong.
The discharge pen that I have was purchased from Amazon Australia here: 1000V Portable Capacitor Discharge Pen High Voltage Quick Discharging Tool Constant Discharge Pen Electronic Repairs Discharge Pen ALKOY.
There seems to be a similar product available from Amazon USA here: YEKMLCO Capacitor Discharge Pen Fast Discharging High Voltage 1000V Repair Tool Discharger for Electronic Safety Intelligent (affiliate link).
In the video you can watch me break this thing open. I didn’t exactly know how to do it, and I permanently damaged the device while opening it. In the end I wasn’t 100% sure what the safe and proper way to open these things really is. Giving it a mighty pull might work, otherwise you will need to leverage off some friction locks.
Before I broke the device open I tried to measure the resistance across its probes, but all three measurement devices reported open circuit. The device doesn’t seem to engage the resistor until it detects a voltage.
Eventually I got the device open, you can see some photos of the circuit board below, and I make some attempt to identify the components.
The MB10F on the top is a bridge rectifier, the M7F in the middle is a rectifying diode, and the resistor at the bottom is 2MΩ. In the video I say that the resistor is a “two ohm resistor”, but it is actually a “two MEGA ohm resistor” (I knew that, I just misspoke).
I’m not 100% sure what the CS01N100 A3R is, but it seems than an CS01N100 A4R is a silicon N-Channel Power MOSFET, so I think that’s probably what that is.
As I broke this device during the teardown I have purchased myself a replacement device for AU$23.02.
In the video I use the following equipment (affiliate links where possible):
In the video I have trouble with the connections into the DSO-TC3, the connections are documented here: FNIRSI DSO-TC3.