1&2 should be identical. #3 is going to give me nightmares. I really like this quote:
I’m not trying to pile onto you, Doug. It is a reasonable guess. Sometime when we are sharing stories, I will tell you about the first time I broke a circuit breaker in my house.
1/2 should be identical. And if I had the slightest problem fitting in wires, I would pick the easier one. But if you are having trouble with reliability, #1 is the easiest to see is right.
If your three devices were incandescent bulbs, then we could play with the idea of wiring them in series. Like old strings of christmas lights. But the LED and microcontroller circuits are not going to be consistent resistance. The terrible thing is that it might even work to do #3. But I wouldn’t be able to predict it without knowing a lot more about your devices.
We need to fix this too. You’re doing great stuff, man! You need the proper tools. If you’re soldering, you need a multimeter.
I have a nice multimeter that was my dad’s, and a cheapo with giant numbers from amazon and a free one from harbor freight. I can usually find 1-2 of them. The HF one always seems to be the first one I find. But they are like tape measures. One isn’t enough, I’m afraid. Especially because you can use them for electronics, or car repair, and electrician jobs.
Indeed. It’s definitely worth having at least one ‘good/trustworthy’ one and then other cheaper ones that can get kicked around or bought for the extra features that make a good one too expensive. I guess that could be expanded to cover almost every type of measurement tool and even perhaps most tools, to be fair.
Much like tape measures, it does pay to remain skeptical of the cheaper ones and double check them when something seems questionable.
I think I have 8 things in total that are multi-meter ish and one thing that’s noticeable is that the cheap ones all start behaving strangely or giving odd/inaccurate readings when the batteries start to get low, which is unfortunate because they also eat batteries. The 3 Flukes, Keysight and Kyoritsu ones all last much, much longer on their batteries, provide plenty of early warning that they’re going flat and remain trustworthy up until the end, too.
Thanks, guys, for the excellent insights, encouragement, and perspective! I now have the new pendant working with my LowRider, connected to the Jackpot board, and moving my LowRider around with it!
