Welcome to the Thursday Toolkit series, about tools for building Physical Computing projects.

Two weeks ago, I extolled the virtues of the multimeter for measuring various electrical units.

With voltages, things are very simple: you’ve got two probes, and you can stick them anywhere in your circuit to measure the voltage potential difference between two points. The input impedance of any modern multimeter is usually 10 MΩ or more, which means the load caused by measuring is neglegible in just about all cases.

Let’s apply Ohm’s law: 10 MΩ over 1V is just 0.1 µA current, and over 230V it’s still just 23 µA current.

But with current measurements, things change: a multimeter in current measurement mode is essentially a short. You place the probe pins between the supplier and consumer of current to measure the Amps, milliamps, or microamps. That also means you can’t just go probing around at random: sticking the probes between + and – of a power supply, or even just a battery, basically creates a short. The result is a huge current, which will blow the internal fuse of the multimeter. Very often, the fuse is a 500 mA type (to protect a 400 mA range).

That’s why the VC170 (left) is better than the VC160 (right) – voltage and current are on different jacks:

But there’s another aspect of current measurement with multimeters to be aware of: burden voltage.

When measuring current, multimeters insert a small resistance in series with the load, i.e. between the two probe pins, and then work by measuring the voltage drop across them (Ohm’s law, again!).

So placing multimeter between current supplier and consumer actually introduces a small voltage drop. How much? Well, that depends both on the multimeter and on the selected range.

Here’s the VC170 with a 1 mA current through it – in its 400 mA range:

I used the VC160 multimeter to measure the voltage over the VC170 multimeter, which is in current measurement mode. This is one example why having several multimeters can come in handy at times.

Not bad – roughly 1 mV to measure 1 mA, so the burden resistor in this unit for the 400 mA range is somewhere around 1.3 Ω. Note also that with 400 mA, the voltage drop will rise to over 500 mV!

Let’s repeat this with the VC170 in µA range, i.e. measuring up to 4000 µA:

Hmmm… the voltage drop with 1 mA is now 100 mV, i.e a 100 Ω burden resistor. Not stellar.

Why is this a problem? Let’s take an example from the JeeNode world: say you want to measure the current consumed by the JeeNode once it has started up and entered some sort of low-power state in your sketch. You expect to see a few µA, so you place the multimeter in µA mode.

The JeeNode starts up, powered from say a 3.6V 3x AA battery pack with EneLoops. It starts up in full power mode, briefly drawing perhaps 10 mA. You’ve got the multimeter in series, which in µA mode means that you’ve got a 100 Ω resistor in series with the battery.

The problem: at 10 mA, a 100 Ω resistor will cause a 1V drop (BTW, make sure you can dream these cases of Ohm’s law, it’s an extremely useful skill). That comes out as 100 V/A burden voltage.

So the battery gives out 3.6V, but only 2.6V reaches the JeeNode. Supposing its ATmega is set to the default fuse settings, then the brown-out detector will force a reset at 2.7V – whoops! You’re about to witness a JeeNode constantly getting reset – just by measuring its current consumption!

In the 400 mA range, the voltage drop at 10 mA will be 13 mV and affect the circuit less (1.3 V/A burden voltage).

The good news is that the multimeter still does auto-ranging. As you can see in the above example, 1 mA is shown with 2 significant decimals, so it’s still possible to read out ± 10 µA in this mode (don’t assume it’ll be accurate beyond perhaps ± 30 µA, though).

Can this problem be avoided? Sure. Several ways:

• stick to the higher current ranges, even if that means you can’t see low values very precisely
• add a Schottky diode in forward mode over the multimeter – this will limit the voltage drop to about 0.3V, even during that brief 10 mA startup peak
• get a better instrument – this is easier said than done, most multimeters have a 1..100 V/A burden voltage (!)
• look at Dave Jones’ µCurrent adapter, which converts low currents to a decent ± 1V range with only 0.07 V/A burden voltage

One caveat with Dave’s solution is that it is never in stock. I’ve been trying to get one for years without luck. He occasionally gets new ones made, but they tend to sell out within nanoseconds, AFAICT!