Late last year, [matseng] set up an interesting challenge for himself: design a new PCB every week, send it off to a fab house, and build a new project. It’s a grueling endeavor, but some of these projects are actually very useful and cool. One of the best so far is the TraId – a board that identifies a transistor type and pinout with a nice LED interface.
This build was partly inspired by Dangerous Prototypes’ Part Ninja, a board that determines the pinouts and values of transistors, resistors, caps, and diodes. The TraId is a much more cut down version usable only for transistors, displaying the orientation of the pins and type of transistor on a set of 8 LEDs.
Although the design is very sparse, we could imagine something like this being very useful in a hackerspace, lab, or anywhere else the gremlins of chaos come to reorganize parts drawers. If you’d like to build your own, all the required files are up on the gits.
This could be modified for testing SMD transistors. These suckers don’t even have a full part number marked on them! I’d rather use a strong magnifying glass than hope the on line catalogs happen to have a particular obscure transistor.
I would assume the footprint at lower left bottom corner is for SOT23.
Probably hold it down just enough that the uP flashes the device type.
Didn’t see that, duh :P
If you have more than 1 type of transistor, it’s not enough to know the pinout and whether it’s N- or P-type. You also need to know the other characteristics.
get the HFE from your multimeter and thats good enough if the transistor is small enough to be unable to find data on it as your probably not going to put it under much load or use them for real sensitive stuff …
The same small size could be 100mA or 2A max collector current, and it could be 500V collector-emitter voltage, or 5V.
‘Gremlins of Chaos’. Some indie band is totally about to use that for a name…
extremely useful tool!
i for one cannot wait to get my hands on a part ninja!
you might start designing your own part ninja. I don’t think dangerous prototypes will ever make a product of that. Matter of fact do hasn’t really produced any prototypes in a long time
The Part Ninja, if I am correct, is based on the Transistor Testor by Markus Frejek and has been enhanced significantly (not related to Dangerous Prototypes) by Karl-Heinz Kübbeler. Mega-long thread here: http://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/248078
I’d still love to build one of those things, better if it was ported to the AVR so I can slap a ATtiny84 on it :)