A €70 LCR meter that just works
I bought a Fnirsi LC1020E. I was tired of wiring together a scope and a signal generator every time I needed to know if a capacitor was still working.
The spec sheet, short: 2.8” TFT; 19999 counts; dual parameter readout (main + X/D/Q/θ/ESR); five test frequencies 100Hz, 120Hz, 1kHz, 10kHz, 100kHz; three test voltages 0,1V, 0,3V, 0,6V; selectable bias voltage 0.0V, 0.5V; Kelvin clips included; battery operated; USB-C for charging and firmware update. Basic accuracy 0.3–0.5% depending on range. Good enough to triage, not enough to replace a calibrated bench bridge but I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Enough for 95% of my lab use
ESR on field-return electrolytics. Railway and industrial ECUs come back with the usual vague complaint: intermittent resets, “works on the bench, dies on site.” ESR drift is a common issue that a multimeter can’t see. Pull the cap, get ESR and capacitance at the right frequency in one shot. Five minutes instead of endless measurements.
Resonant systems: speakers, solenoids, transformers, relay coils. Anything with a coil and a mechanical or magnetic counterpart lives or dies by its often undocumented electrical parameters. An unknown relay coil, a transformer winding gone high-resistance, a solenoid whose inductance has shifted because of insulator failure: none of that shows up on a continuity check. L and R at the right frequency, compared against a known-good unit, is usually enough to confirm the behaviour before I start disassembling anything mechanical. LCR meter gives also the benefit of being able to model the resonant system for simulation.
Unmarked inductors with no datasheet Of course every inductor datasheet already gives you Q and L across frequency. The actual use case is the salvaged, unmarked, sanded-off coil pulled off a board I’m reverse engineering, where there is no datasheet, period. That’s when a quick real measurement beats an educated guess.
Component ID during reverse engineering. No BOM, no silkscreen, no cooperative original engineer. Auto-detect R/L/C narrows “what is this thing” down before I commit real bench time to anything more invasive.
Incoming inspection. Sorting mode with nominal/tolerance and pass/fail alerts: cheap ad fast insurance against a bad reel making it onto a board that will give me headaches months later.
Field kit weight. Battery powered, pocket-sized, doesn’t require hauling a bench instrument to a client site for what’s fundamentally a sanity check.
What it isn’t
Not a substitute for a real bench LCR meter when 0.1% accuracy, logging, or proper four-terminal Kelvin work on mΩ components. For that, heavier iron can be rented. This one lives in the “fast, good enough, always within reach” tier, which covers most of what actually do.
Mr. Mirtillo Malcontento, Quality Inspector, anyway thinks the box is too small to be useful.
If you’re evaluating a collaboration and want to know how I can help you, get in touch.