[SMCARA] You are gonna want one of these

[Clarke, Tom AIR4.0P NATOPS]

I ran across an ad for a neat little kit on the net recently and ordered a couple of them.  It is advertised as an "M8 Transistor Tester Kit" and runs about $20. It comes direct from China in about a week.

It is called a transistor tester, but it is much more!  It has 3 terminals for the item to be tested and the results are displayed on an LCD. Hook a resistor to any 2 of the terminals and the display will show a resistor icon and resistance. Place a capacitor, inductor or any "mystery" component,  and the display will tell you what it is and the value.  Connect a transistor to the 3 terminals in any order, and it will figure out what kind of device it is and give you the pertinent info on the device.  It will also read the ESR of a capacitor.

The kit contains a nice 2 x 3 inch PC board, display, pre-programmed microprocessor chip (ATMega328), and a handful of other components. It is powered by a 9 volt battery or 6-12 volts of external power.  It went together easily and worked the first time power was applied!  The amusing part is that the instructions are in "Chinglish".  Pretty easy to figure out what they are trying to say when they talk about "welding" the components to the PC board they really mean "to solder"!  You're on your own for an enclosure/case.

N.B.- The Chinese resistor color code is different than the RETMA code used in the US!  It consists of three significant digit bands, instead of two, and one multiplier band. The colors and order are the same as ours. Caution non-Politically Correct mnemonic follows: Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls Behind Victory Garden Walls to help you remember the color code: Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White

This project was designed by a German fellow, Karl-Heinz Kubbeler and it was then copied by the Chinese and kitted up!  There appear to a number of them available via Google search.  All the docs are available on this site: 
AVR Transistortester - Mikrocontroller.net   Yes, there is an English translation there!

Try going to eevblog for more info.  Google aliexpress for the one I purchased (High-Quality-NPN-PNP-Mosfet-DIY-Kit-Capacitance-ESR-Inductance-Transistor-LC-Resistor-Meter-Tester-M168/32265439587)

This might be a neat club project. I'll bring it to the next meeting for show and tell.

73
Tom/W4OKW