Eric and I have been jousting over who gets to use the only Digital Multi Meter (DMM) in our lab. To solve the issue Eric picked up a do it your self DMM Kit from SparkFun Electronics. This morning I had the pleasure of assembling it! As I opened the box, past memories of electronic kit building started to haunt me. How was I going to figure out which direction the capacitors went, or what resistor values went where? All my anxiety was washed away by the clearly labeled circuit board and the short, precise instruction manual. It was a breeze to assemble the kit, and once I found charged batteries, the new DMM booted its AVR microcontroller and functioned perfectly. With its simple, straight forward design and open source code, it’s going to be a challenge not to customize the firmware to make this DMM more my own. And now with the new laser cutter up and running at Modular Robotics, we should have a custom enclosure cut out in no time!

For fun, I made a little time-lapse movie of the assembly.