Oh, and in rereading your charts I'm glad to see that your Estes igniter results pretty well line up with the several dozen instrumented firings I've done, some of which will be discussed at vNARCON at the end of the month.
Need help measuring ignitor current draw
- Thread starter manixFan
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Actually it was NARCON 2010, and you you can see that I was still collecting data for my presentation from the oscilloscope screen shot showing 17 February 2010 @22:00 hours. Trip asked me to perform the testing and make the presentation as it was at time when TARC teams were using a lot of BP clustered flights. I was working in the EMC lab at Tektronix back then and I had access to any oscilloscopes, current probes, and power supplies I needed with a phone call. The real challenge was to find an indoor location to collect the data with an exhaust to keep the igniter smoke out of the room and not triggering the smoke detectors. Fortunately I was able to get access to a small maintenance shop that was plumbed into the building process exhaust system.
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Very cool! I used the published date as the date on the file.
This looked like an inexpensive way to do what I'm after, so I ordered a unit. However, the store owner (Randy at R/C Dude Hobbies) emailed me and said I ordered the last unit in stock, and when they tested it before shipping it, it was bad. So they canceled my order since they don't plan to restock.
However, in an incredible customer service move, he gave me a link to another store that still has them in stock, but at much lower prices! Here's the link he sent me:
https://www.allerc.com/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=emeter&x=0&y=0
I did order a unit and the accessories. Just in case anyone else is considering trying those units out, I thought I'd pass that info along.
Tony
I originally posted about R/C Dude because Randy has been so helpful both with the Emeter II and with another OOP piece of test equipment from a defunct company. He also loaded a later version of the firmware on the Emeters before shipping.
I knew about Dave Soebel and allerc as well. In fact I just bought two more of them from there because I could not ignore the price and I wanted to get another because I managed to wear out one of the four pushbutton switches on the one I started my igniter/battery test project with.
If you like, once you get it, start a conversation with me and we'll walk through charging (you need some kind of 12V power supply to which to connect the charge lead that comes with it), as well as the firmware update to get the Emeter to better recognize the battery and to get the 8Hz sample rate to work properly with whichever of the three data units you ordered. The Emeter you will get will have a 2s Li-poly battery in it instead of the 5 cell AAA NiMh packs they were originally designed to use, but the state-of-charge indication in the version of the firmware it's shipped with from allerc still thinks it's a NiMH.
You will also need a small SD card (2Gb is far more than you need) onto which the firmware files, help files and such can be copied, and onto which the log files will be recorded when you start doing that.
I will see if i can find electronic versions of the documentation for later firmware than the version of the instructions that will be in the box with the Emeter that I can send your way as well.
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