Archive for August, 2010

Parasitic probe capacitance of Smart Tweezers

// August 25th, 2010 // No Comments » // Smart Tweezers Tricks and Tips

How to extract parasitic probe capacitance of Smart Tweezers?

The parasitic probe capacitance depends on the distance between the tips, that is it will be different for different measured component sizes. To obtain the value of capacitance of the Smart Tweezers probes of you have to do following:

a) Select mode for capacitance measurements by setting MEASURE -> MODE -> CAP. Letter C will indicate that you selected capacitance measurement mode.

b) Select measurement frequency 10 kHz by setting MEASURE -> FREQ -> 10 kHz

c) When you squeeze the probes until the size of the gap is equal to the size of component which you are going to measure the parasitic capacitance value will be displayed on the screen. This is the value that you have to subtract from any measured capacitance of the same size. Typical parasitic probe capacitance is about 1.5 pF.

Smart Tweezers Spare Tips

// August 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Smart Tweezers Maintenance

Why do you need spare tweezers’ tips for Smart Tweezers? The tips are made of gold plated stainless steel and the gold tends to wear out with time. Apparently the wear out mostly depends on the number of touches and the quality of surfaces that are touched. A rough estimate with a moderate intensity of Smart Tweezers’ use would be 2-3 years. Typical contact resistance of the Smart Tweezers Tips is about 20 mOhms. It can be as high as 1 Ohm for a heavily used Smart Tweezers.