A few weeks ago I read a post (on Hackaday) about a quite versatile component tester and considering its low price I yielded to the temptation to buy one on eBay…

Well, it arrived this week and so far I’m quite impressed how flexible it is in identifying various components (capacitors, diodes, transistors) I’ve stuck into it. It is surprisingly accurate as far as I can compare it to my multimeter (which on the other hand is pretty cheap).One of the reasons of buying it is my hope to keep its firmware up-to-date due to the pretty active community on microcontroller.net — see this mostly German thread) on its development. It is built around an Atmel ATMega328.

My hope is that it simplifies my task in finally cleaning up and sorting my big box of mixed components I had kept out of my sight over the last years… 😉
Measuring caps down to 28pF worked pretty well; below that, e.g. 22pF, failed.