Joulescope Unboxing and Teardown

Originally published at: https://contextualelectronics.com/joulescope-unboxing-and-teardown/

In a first for this channel, Chris does an unboxing video (and brief teardown) of the Joulescope. Matt Liberty, creator of the Joulescope, sent a replacement unit to Chris after a unit issue. This unit will be used to measure current on the ABC Board in upcoming videos. Chris hopes to measure how long the ABC board will be able to survive in the field without charging via a solar panel.

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Just finished watching - I like the new direction. My only feedback is I would have liked it to go into more details! I was excited when you started talking about the difficulties in design and was really looking forward to hearing why design decisions were made and why the device is the way it is - this is not something I work with much and so those details are super interesting.

So Contextual Electronics Unboxing and tear down is great, but the extra contextual elements would be great

i will also add that this is one of the reasons i enjoy Bunnies “name that ware” - im rarely in the ballpark of actually getting it right, but reading the solutions is informative

Good feedback! I’ll be doing more videos with the Joulescope in the future, so I’ll try to go into more detail. If you haven’t yet, I suggest you take a listen to the episode with @mliberty, he was a great guest on The Amp Hour

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I just got mine the other day. Am excited to get it going.

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Not very professional or impressive perhaps, but for most of my use cases alligator clips are convenient, so here’s my default Joulescope setup. The little piece of wood helps to prevent short circuits when wires move around :slight_smile:

The USB panel would be nice to have, but considering the tiny business I’m running and the very significant shipping cost, it’ll wait. Maybe I’ll cobble up something from parts I have, that will plug into this panel instead…

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Yeah, I bet you could throw a design in with your next PCB order and just manufacture one to use parts you have at home. There’s not too much going on with the panels, unless I’m missing something. Will be interesting to see how else people use them though!

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Hi @igendel: Interesting times we live in that ordering custom PCBs may be cheaper (neglecting your time) than shipping a small-volume product. You can download the Gerbers and design files from the PCB repo:

You could also check and see what shipping is like from Welectron in Germany:

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Wait, what… I remembered there were gerbers on GitHub, but somehow only checked the USB 3 panel and overlooked the Eagle subdirectory (probably because I only use KiCAD)

That does change the picture. I’ll redo my calculation :slight_smile:

The Germany option doesn’t help BTW, it’ll actually cost more than through your shop. The usual woes of international shipping.

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There’s a kicad version of the plain front panel @igendel. I made the whole thing a footprint so you can just add connectors. It may not be a good or proper way to provide the Joulescope front panel in kicad but it worked fine for me. @mliberty was kind enough to accept the pr but if you can improve it, please do!

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