Inside a 22mm digital panel indicator/voltmeter. 

Anything over normal mains voltage I always use the 'SIDE rule'. (Switch off, Isolate, Dump, & Earth). Stay safe out there. And Thanks Clive. Another brilliant little video. Please keep them coming.

I love these videos on interesting panel lamps and displays. It’s always nice to think of a project where I’ll use them. I’m sure I’m not the only one who creates a project just as an excuse to use them!

For that price (in view of the functionality) these are a steal! Not only "power-on" status, but supply voltage too, and really easy cabinet mounting (with a sealing ring too I note). Definitely buying a few of these!!

Addicted to this channel now! Explosions and fires are a bonus too.

These are really something neat! Looking forward to applying them! Thanks Clive!

I've not listened to that track in years! Spot on!

I can't believe you just dropped that reference, brother. You're the one and only dominator.

Absolute belter of a tune Clive. Ah the good old days

Wow! Just ordered a few including the ampere meters. They're great for power distributions for dimmers and other event equipment :)

Happy to see you loving old classic's, recognized It when you spoke :) And after see the links, I'm a fan too ;) Thanks for the teardown by the way, but if you use them permanently put a fine fuse before, these kind of brown / green cheap Chinese film tend to file way to often...

Very cool, very interesting. I like the way the LED panels look without the colored caps. More true color and clear looking... I know it's part of the functional package though.

Lol, loved that music reference :)

Bought one of these a while back, due to the numerous power failures we experience (and an even more important reason! (Long story, won't go into it here)), and connected it to the incoming feed of the earth leakage. It works like a charm, as I can now just glance over at the DB Board and see if they have granted us the Privelage of municipal power that we pay for every month, but hardly get.

It would have been interesting to see some of these devices hooked up to a variable transformer; to determine the actual minimum voltage at which they start operating, and also to check their accuracy across a range of voltages. It might read right at 240V, but if the slope is wrong then it could give false readings that just get wronger and wronger as you move further away from the swwet spot ..... Actually, I might order me a couple of these little meters to fit to my own homemade (well, I didn't wind it myself, but I put it in a neat housing, with an on-off switch and fuseholders for input and output fuses) variac. At that price, it hardly matters if they turn out to be bollocks. They still look damn sexy!

Dominator. There is no other. Lovin the vids m8👍

Dominator! Wow. One of the first "hoover" tracks. The hoover is a staple of many many tracks over the years. "What the".

Regarding your comment about double checking whether a circuit has been isolated with voltmeter or test lamps. Takes me to my apprenticeship. Had a "simple" task of changing some spent indicator lamps in a control panel. Turned the main isolator on front of panel and and heard some contacts drop out. Came to grab a lamp holder and got a nasty clout. As it was a 1960's machine the terminals were all open and exposed plus it had 240V control needless to say it knocked some sense into me. I had the exact same thing with a broken isolator handle. It broke the contacts enough to drop some relays out but they had sprung back closed. Sometimes now i'll double check and treble check with a different voltmeter just to verify thats working !

Holy crap, if those don't have an nasty tendency to explode they're great!

I want to believe that it's just because you've worked on many rides in your time, that you know the track, but a big part of me really believes you're really a major rave head! :)

Yep, listened to that track - many summers ago. Cheers

I know fuck all about electronics but for some strange & somewhat hypnotics reason, I just have to watch every BIG Clive video...

That Carl Cox remix is bangin'

was looking for a mini VDC gauge ....... so using your info found the DC versions thanks mate

The one and only Clive! 😎

I'm the one and only dominator, dominator... Great tune!

The old spinning utility meter was replaced by an electronic one at my house not too long ago. 3 phases Landis&Gyr. I was there during the install and asked about the phase voltages. So the installer ripped open the main junction into the meter and probed the terminals. When he was done, I showed him how to read them directly on the meter... Took me half a minute to work out how; figured that pressing buttons shouldn't mess with meter setting. Voltages were near enough to those measured by meter. Months later, I concluded that the meter change had been to my advantage with consistently lower electrical power consumption on my bills.

awesome track ha

I got that same fluke dvom from UTI (automotive school) way back in 1993 and it still works today.

Big Clive is like the Bob Ross of electronics :D So relaxing lol

1:50 i was just listening with one ear, but i got the reference... that's long ago... "IM AM THE ONE AND ONLY DOMINATOR"

Clive's an oldskool raver baby yey

Funnily enough, I was just watching the generator changeover switch video again, mostly cos there was nothing else to watch and I find those things interesting... :D Useful little indicators for generators (goes nicely with the changeover switch!!) that lack an output voltage display, an cheap enough that if they do fail, it's not really much of a problem... :)

You should send a bunch of those unmarked chips to electronupdate to decap and analyze

You can now get these panel lamps with current displays as well as the voltage in the same package...pretty nifty!

You could connect them as star, with or without the neutral. though without you may need some balance resistors so they don't go out of range. Where i worked we lost 7 motors to an imbalance, something like 270, 190, and 80V Would also make a nice cheap voltage probe ;)

Hi I ordered 4 of these ( 2 red , 1 green , 1 yellow ) from Ruledesign at 99p/103p each and they have just arrived . Like you I connected them all to my Safeblock and my DMM but I did it via a variac . The red and yellow ones started working at 13volts but they were flashing . At 24v the green started flashing 24 but the others were steady and reading 32v. it needed more than 60v before they were all steady . At 100v they read 86 , 86, 100 and 100 so the red are not so well calibrated . Nice ! Alan

I like how those panel indicator/meters are round. That means a simple drill/hole saw/generic round punch is all that is needed to mount it. None of those specialty or expensive DIN rectangular punches that can be a bear to get the rotational alignment just right.

Love it. Thanks for taking these apart. It saved me the trouble. Are there similar pic devices that drive an LED display like that directly?

I've got a version of those that plugs into a car cigarette lighter socket, which costed a whole £3 including postage from China. I use it to keep a rough check on my car battery state of charge (my car has a smart charging system, and swaps from circa. 14.4 volt when actually charging the battery, to 12.3V when its fully charged and being floated). Only using the car once a week due to Covid lockdown etc., and was surprised to see that it takes well over half an hour to charge the battery after the long shut down period.

Techno forever!!

Yeah, "always check the panel with a meter." When I was a teenager working as an apprentice for an asphalt plant manufacturer, we were installing new controls in a plant in South Florida. The plant's power panels were all checked and locked out. Overnight there was a small thunderstorm as is normal for the region. Lightning bridged a connection on one of the bus bars inside the panel. One of the techs went to dig out a 3 phase line in the yard, struck the live line and blew 2/3rds of the face of the shovel off. Unbelievably he was thrown/jumped backwards and was fine. I was under a countertop and out if sight, but even the reflection was one of the brightest things I've ever seen... The idiots that owned the planet didn't use conduit, so the wire was just thrown in a ditch and covered (it never freezes in Southern Florida). Moral of the story... sometimes checking, locking out, and labeling aren't enough.

Murata makes 30mm ones with different ranges in industrial quality. Also industrial prices, but quick and easy to mount those round ones.

So I am not the only one who had a faulty three phase isolator. I turned it off, checked them all and nothing, then went to look around to see where the burning smell was coming from. Checked a lot of it and found nothing, checked the isolator itself, all ok, but customer said it was smelling (which I didn't argue about) so I turned it on with the panel open ( as you know there is no choice sometimes) to test things. I found nothing so I turned it off, yes, you guessed it, this time one didn't go fully off and bingo! Boy did it bloody hurt! I always have a habit of touching circuits with my finger nail first, this way if it is live where it should not be your muscles naturally contract and your finger is pulled clear of the circuit. DUH! What did I learn, check it every time, isolator changed out and it was fine. No, it took me a day of so to feel fine! It came as a bit of a surprise, after that no one was allowed to work on three phase panels without someone else being there. That made no sense to me and I said you will still get electrocuted on 240v. To this the management replied "Yes, but not so bad!" What the?!!!

good jobs

I wish I could find a replacement rubber holster for my vintage fluke, I have the 77 Series II which is basically the same meter as that. I've been looking on eBay for the past 10 years for one! Great meter.

That'd be nice device with range covering 12VDC too!

Nice, just checked them out to find an "Australian price", found some more expensive but more interesting models, using an inductive loop. Perhaps you may like to test one or two out.

“Let’s get a meter in,” then nudges the Fluke even further out of the frame with the Amecal. Poor old Fluke.

Would have been cool to see these tested to max voltage. :)

Some noname-dedicated ic. Its a so-14 package, the 1st and 14th leg ment for power supply (+5v) and a common ground. And the 9th leg appear to be adc input with internal reference of 1.1 volts. Easyly can be converted to dc ampere meter.

still got my Dominator 12" :D

i would like to see your take on a nixie lamp i love your videos by the way! very informative

That ebay seller is very famous i buy it them some electronics several years ago.

In the future "they" will know the correct chronological order of bigclives videos by the wound healing progress on the man's thumb.

On Aliexpress there are these (slightly cheaper, free delivery) BUT more interestingly there are Ammeter models driven from a toroidal core which I guess slips over the feed to be measured! They are slightly more expensive!

Awesome thanks bigclive that will go good with my homemade power supply. Do they a series that measures current?

i like your music

1:49 I remember those lyrics from Scooter - Posse

I have that size of seven segment display in my component box that cost more to buy than all four of those things together. Crazy times.

Like these. Would be nice to mount on my cars dash to keep an eye on the battery charge.

Your the 1 and only dominater lol

Thumbs up just for the song!

These are nice little cheap units. I wonder, what is the parasitic voltage/amps that it draws? Would be interesting to use for a powerwall application to monitor without any major circuitry or programming.

I wonder if the manufacturers ever print the ID number on the underside of anon microchips ! Would it be worth desoldering one to find out ?

So, I'm curious, is 1.41 a general measurement for the maximum potential of an AC mains supply or is that mostly applicable in the UK? Interested in the reasoning behind this as well. It gave a figure of 169 volts based on the 120v here in Canada, which sounds familiar, I think possible due to the setting on some of my UPS's

Very cool indicator. Sadly, might not handle the 3 phase voltages here: 577 V phase to phase. I believe Canada uses the highest 3 phase industrial voltage in the world. These might work OK in the USA, where it is 460 - 480 V phase to phase. One way around this might be to read phase to ground/neutral, which is 347 V.

Did a conversion on one of the other type last week, wanted a 12VDC version, so the cheapest was to use the 220VAC version and simply remove the capacitor. Funny enough the 220VAC versions are perfectly fine at 24VAC, just slightly dimmer.

Have 2 Flukes but now they need repair. Fluke is too expensive so I need to find a third party repair depot that might be a bit more reasonable, they have served me quite well in the past 35 years.

Very nice but will they handle the 3 phase voltages?

You are so good at everything, BigClive. Is there a way that they can be calibrated, as my mains reads 243V but the indicator reads 250V? Once again, thanks for all of your videos.

@bigclivedotcom I didn't see it asked in the other comments, but did you test the current draw of the meters? It would be nice to have a rough idea how much they would cost to operate...

Didn't Scooter also use that bit of lyrics in one of their songs? In Posse or so?

I think it's assembled the other way around. The contacts at the back get their components soldered onto, those two resistors namely, then the contacts get installed, and the PCB gets threaded onto the resistors; then the PCB is soldered in place. If there's a bit of lead poking around the display that is - if there isn't, i'll need a new theory.

It's time to play....Name That Tune!

A switch with Volt Meter Indicator would be nice.

Can it be easily modified for DC use? Obviously the power supply needs to be changed, but would be able to read DC? Might depend on the softwares I think.

I need some meters for a variac.. I found some old analog ones at a hamfest but they're about 4x bigger than I want. These things looked great but the minimum rating of 60v would be a bit weak, and i'd need an ammeter too.

you know it's high quality when it doesn't even take the protective film off

Clive , is there any device/software that will interrogate a chip that may be unmarked and identify the chip details ?

That Dominator reference though. Fuck I'm old

Guess I got the reference thanks to some German DJs who re-hashed it. (Warp Bros)

Have you seen that someone has produced a 500W LED? I would love to see you try it out! It's pretty expensive, though.

Nice music taste...

good old Carol Cox

Question:Though the specs state that the voltage range of these indicator meters is 60V-300V, are they capable of indicating voltages lower than that minimum? For example, if connected to a variac, would they go down to zero ("000")?

The voltage range is quite large. That is impressive. I would like to know how the supply circuit is constructed. The 470nF capacitor passes quite a lot of current at 500V. What about the frequency rating? Will it also work at 60Hz?

That is one of the stranger things about electronics and ICs now: the packaging, production, storage and logistic cost so much more than the actual chip that now it is cheaper to waste a computer many times stronger than the one used fore the Apollo missions just to have an illuminated voltage reading. Yes - those tiny dirty cheap ICs used for this type of application are more capable than the ones used to send men to the moon.

I'M THE ONE AND ONLY DOMINATOR! I'M THE ONE AND ONLY DOMINATOR! That was the first track on a compilation album called "Only For The Headstrong" that I absolutely listened the crap out of back in the day. I get the impression from the occasional musical reference you drop that you listened to a fair share of dance music in the 90's. Do you still? Or not so much?

I actually bought the same ones. Haven't used them yet.

test too with Adjustable Power Supply - different volts

430k is a standard value, as is 51R, Clive. The different tolerances have progressively more values as tolerance becomes tighter. Check out a decent resistor values chart, and you'll see what I mean.

would it be possible to do a quick follow up with the old reverse engineered clive schematic? or would that anonymous 14 pin chip be too big a roadblock? I’m not sure I understand how these work and I’d love to know!

Amazing my friend ♥♥♥♥♥ Nice to meet you ♥♥♥♥♥ Best wishes for you ♥♥♥♥♥ Keep it up .......... ♥♥♥♥♥

Offtopic, there was a old dr who (the second guy) who fought "the dominators" :)

Im the one and only dominator.... tune.

Weird question, could I use one of these to monitor the current going to a large dc motor? Connecting it between the input and output?

its a fluke if it works. nice video thumbs up

Clive could you make a video showing us the lighting controller panels you designed?

If I have this in circuit always on, will it draw power and reduce my DC output. If so, by how much. I need to maintain a certain voltage.

Do a video on deep / far infrared LEDs!!!