Engineers , and we’ve got a lot of them here at UEI, will tell you a digital multimeter (DMM) is a ubiquitous tool in the lab, desktop or workbench.
Our engineers and production techs routinely use them to check electric values in components under test, troubleshoot product issues, and verifying calibration in our I/O boards before they’re shipped to customers.
Bottom line, it’s an essential piece of gear and for years customers have requested we add one to our lineup of I/O. We always love feedback so set to work on designing one.
But why would an engineer purchase a UEI DMM if they already have one?
Bob Judd, UEI’s Director of Business Development has insights. "[Our DMM-261 board] offers typical 6.5 digit DMM capabilities,” he explains. “It measures AC (true RMS) and DC voltage, AC and DC current and Resistance, but it’s much more rugged than anything you can find in standard box instrument.”
The UEI DMM shares the same wide temperature and high shock and vibration specifications as our standard Cube, RACKtangle and MIL chassis series. This makes it an ideal choice for applications like flight-line testing, ground systems & equipment monitoring, armament testing, fueling systems and more.
While the environmental operating specs are impressive another obvious benefit is the compact size (A x B x C”) and feather weight (XXX oz.) of the board.
It’s a very complex device, but required one compromise – channel count. The DMM-261 has a single channel. To compensate for this challenge we developed our MUX-461 and MUX-461-350 multiplexer boards to act as companion boards. Each one can connect directly to a DMM and provide it with an additional 26 two-wire or 13 four-wire channels. For applications requiring even more “up to five MUX boards can be easily daisy chained” together to expand the channel count up to 130 channels in a single UEI chassis.
Like all UEI products, these boards are supported “by a complete software suite, including support for Windows, Linux and all popular RTOS. And all software support includes extensive example programs that make it easy to cut and paste the I/O software into your applications.”
Do you use a UEI DMM-261? Write and tell us how you use it. We’d love to hear from you.