Ucore curve tracer Ct202l

this is a quick review on the ucor what they call a fault locator their model use cect 2200 l vault locator this device is made over in europe and there was very little that i could find on the internet i did buy this direct from the ucore folks and basically it's a voltage current curve tracer comes with a about a 10 page manual that's very small if you're old like me you're going to need your reading glasses to be able to use it um there's there's an interesting story we'll get to in just a little bit about the problems i've had with this the problems were my problems and should have known better but it was a faulty component in the unit i was working on so let's let's do a quick overview of this voltage current tracer um this is uh what the unit looks like um they're it's basically a processor board with a display on it and it puts out various voltages which you can select in various frequencies and it generates a curve that you can see if we start from the over here and it comes with this little nifty little pin or pin type deal that takes you back to the uh days of a blackberry but the info is simply and it's kind of washed out but it's all it is it's basically a about page has a serial number on it there's also probe calibration it comes with two probes that are terminated in bnc to the end of the unit which is here and you've got it's basically a two-channel unit and when we select probe calibration we'll get some of the glare off of that uh it tells you to connect the probe to the a channel and short the probes together and when you do that touch the panel to continue it goes through a very quick basically zero and the probes out i probably reads the resistance and the capacitance of the probe so once we've done that we're good to go then we can go to screen calibration and again this uh just click on the crosshairs and this will tell the unit where everything exists you can also capture the pictures of your display whenever you have a trash and if i had captured any they would be located in here and i could delete open them close them and format them so close that you can also use this as a usb drive but that's not the primary purpose the primary purpose for that would be for updating your software and taking any of the files that you had captured of the trace and taking them over to your main computer and now for the heart of the matter let's go to the tracer so in the tracer this is open probes and you can print the screen um [Music] you have four different voltages level that are you see in low one two and three referring to the manual it says low as five volts plus or minus 5 volts low 2 is plus and minus 5 volts as well so i'm not quite sure why we have two of the lows but um and then medium is plus and minus 10 volts and high is plus and minus 20 volts so and just a quick reference to the a low one is 6.625 volts for division and low 2 is 1.25 volt per horizontal division so your voltage is red on your x-axis your current is red on the y-axis so let's look at a component we'll throw a um and these are brand new capacitors um we'll throw one on here and connect it up to the connect it into the device here and we've got a two kilohertz signal applied to it and at five volts and this is what uh what what this particular cap looks at uh this is a polyester film cap let's go over and look at a ceramic disc cap a little bit different display you see that basically and let's see what happens when we change this from low so this is changing your voltage in the on the x-axis and we changed this went to 10 volts voltage and now went to 20 and then in the scan mode we'll go through each one of those various voltages if we had a second probe set up we could compare two caps one right on the other this is where this unit shines if you have a good component you can place it place a good component and then place a component under question on the other channel and you can determine if that component is is good how about electrolytic cap this is a 30 microfarad electrolytic and that's disconnected now we're going to connect it up uh let's go to right now we're not showing any voltages it looks just like the the leads would be shorted change the frequency see if that there we go and that's your electrolytic uh my guess and as strictly guess is if we had uh and over time the the voltage maybe not since we are going plus and minus it's putting an ac signal on there we're not going to probably not going to see that grow it's not not going to charge that cap up uh we'll put a diode in line this is an led here okay and you see uh at 0.65 looks like this this is a red led and i don't know if the camera will pick this up but you can actually see that it's pulsing this led as it goes back and forth at 10 hertz at 100 hertz it goes solid you can't see it 500 2 000 there if we apply uh more voltage there i don't want to hit it with over well that's just a little diode blows so what this is we changed our x-axis now we're going to put 10 volts on it and it still didn't blow it and there's 20 volts so all right that's uh with the actually positive negative will reverse the leads and you see you have the reverse indication there about a power transistor okay no conduction there and that between those leads were good we've got we've got some so basically we if we take it down here see if it's going to turn on at 5 volts yeah it looks like a standard standard junction here turning on about a little bit more than six and a quarter volts so and reversing it okay so if we had our second set of leads up we could stack them on top of each other and see what's going on so we're able to change the frequency change the voltage one and two changes the scale we can have it scan which will run it at all different voltages we could actually print this out which is going to print it to the print it to a file and then if we go to page two uh when you're running two of them you can take and move the uh the traces up and down on here and then on this page you can also change the the frequency between 1k and 10k so that's pretty much the unit it does exactly what it says it's about a 300 unit it might be a little bit pricey but now let's uh let me tell you about the service experience i had with these guys um and this uh this thing has been it's been very helpful as far as trey oh one other thing forgot to do this one let's go back it's been helpful chasing down stuff uh that we do and you work with shall i say we work with a cold unit without the power applied to it here's just a plain old resistor so that's a resistor let me see if i've got a different value here on the bench or put my hands on a 47. looks like 47k and you can see that that is quite a bit a difference between this guy which was in the mags and it just happened to be one that was sitting here on the on the bench and if it was sitting here it was probably not reading right it's probably really close to being open let's see what else we got over here on the workbench we can grab and look at a diode diode one direction and we'll switch it over that's a short open and now the diode in the other direction another resistor this is a metal film and i can't read the color code and you see the slats a little bit different on the resistor uh keep what you should note is that the resistor is conducting on the negative as well as the positive voltage levels where when we went to a semiconductor it was only conducting in one way so nothing going on here and then all of a sudden it hits uh in this case let's go down here it's uh six point something volts or 0.6 volts and there we go all right now for the story of the service with this guy i was using this thing and was working on a on an old power supply that was plugged in and was not on an isolation transformer which is probably mistake number one i know better and but i wasn't wasn't planning on touching anything that would have been been hot it was plugged into my variac the switch was turned off on the unit and i was not measuring anything i simply picked the probes up and was moving them over and in the process i hit a ground i also had this thing powered by usb which i forgot to tell you about this this can be powered right off your computer which i don't suggest because that was my problem i have since got a little uh battery box usb battery box and what happened when my ground when one of these wires hit ground that end was that ground was hot even though it was plugged in it was not isolated and it went through the unit and i'll show you what happened it went through that channel that was connected took the trace off burned the trace off of there and then the process ate up a number of components in there so these guys are in europe it says where they're at in europe but anyway so their time zones took terribly different than ours and all this was done via email so i would send him an email in the afternoon and the next morning i would get a response so i sent him an email told him told him what i had done admitted to my mistake it was not their problem and lo and behold they said oh uh there's these little protection diodes here uh go get go get those and replace those q1 you know that's the first thing it was a so i re and you can see the sloppy solder job theirs is not near theirs is very nice so we went and i went and replaced those uh then there's a couple little solid-state devices here i replaced those and then still didn't work so that's they sent back some troubleshooting clues check the voltages here here and here i did so they said all right replace the capacitors and they gave me the numbers this one this one this one flip the board over this is where the power comes in replace this capacitor this capacitor this capacitor all those capacitors replaced all of those did not fix it then there's a it was some teeny weeny resistors right here replace that resistor still no good replace this guy right here still no good so i kept checking and said okay finally they got down well this this u15 is uh some type of voltage regulator i believe is what they said uh and i was not getting any i was not getting my five volts in into the to where it should be as well it's probably this voltage regulator i don't know if you can see this and probably if i pulled out the microscope you probably could but they finally got down and this is after about two weeks of going back and forth they says oh replace you fifteen so and it may have been more than two weeks because when i went to i did not have obviously didn't didn't have all these parts in stock went had to go order the parts wait three or four days they'd show up i'd put them in then i'd send them a text and back and forth so this guy here is beyond my soldering capabilities i don't know if i can get that where you can see it but that there's about ten pins about five or six on either side of this little guy right here so at that point i said that you know guys that's it i'm done you know sell me another board let me know what it cost and the guy says okay here for you is a deal and i don't remember it was less than about a hundred bucks this is the heart of the whole unit so uh the display that we had over here i believe they found that as a standard off-the-shelf part somewhere either as a uh you know one of the adrino's or what one of the standard microprocessor displays i it's my guess i don't know that for a fact just guessing so uh this is the old board um you know basically my fault i i touched it to um to a ground that was hot because of a bad component that had not totally discharged and when it did it discharged through through the power port which is this port here to the computer i was fortunate that the computer apparently had decent enough protection that it did not harm the computer since then when i power this thing on i use a usb uh power battery uh you can buy walmart who knows where else but uh and it powers it for for quite a while i i can get a couple three hours out of it and normally this is something that i only use for a few minutes uh one last thing i don't know why they have this they have a reset button and a boot button every time you turn it off it turns off and then when you unplug it there's no turning it off when you plug it up it turns on well that's uh that's it guys um not a bad little device maybe a little bit pricey but seems to be well made uh the people that sell it and built it i believe are one in the same i don't know where all you can find it i know you can find it at there um if you search for u-core electronics you can find it there they do make some other devices um i was just looking for something that would uh that would be somewhat similar to the hunt huntron tracer which i don't have i have um have a leader uh i don't remember the model number but transistor curve tracer and that requires a scope and it's a big box and it's bulky and it takes lots of room but they have a little short description in here to tell you what you're looking at a capacitor makes an oval resistors a slant short circuits straight up and down open circuit is a horizontal line this would be a diode this is an emitter junction this is a zener and i think this is a base emitter junction that's degraded so they'll tell you that it will test resistors capacitors coils general purpose diodes zeners barristers virtually any type of transistor you'll do scr triax relays you can look at those if they're open close leds photo transistors uh you can even check integrated circuits uh if you've got two alike um and i worked with the lm 723 was what i was working with on this um when i blew this thing which was a lot of power supply turns out that was not uh that was only one of the many problems on the power supply was a 723 it it had been i believe rosely overloaded so that's it guys the u-core is it you know unicorn yes you core electronics fault locator i hope that was helpful to somebody especially if you were looking at buying one of these things i've got it i use it not daily i would put it right up there with um some of the extra equipment i've got that you could probably do without but it makes life a little bit easier and i'm sure there's other ways that that you can skin this cat without without spending that money and you can also spend um a thousand bucks or better and get one of the huntrons which uh maybe one of these days but who knows have a great day

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Views: 2,750

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Id: 0UyATi5O1GQ

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020