I was wondering besides the obvious on how to check for ohms is there a trick I need to do with a Buttkicker Transducer or just set the meter to ohms and touch the 2 wires and read the reading??
I ask because I did just that and the Transducer is 2 ohms but it only read .001 ohms when I tested it…
In general yes, set the meter to resistance and put them on the the wires. Check to verify that you’re set on just ohms instead of kilo ohms or such. My first guess would be your on the wrong range if it’s not an auto-setting multimeter.
Well it is an Auto-setting meter so I am in the right range… I am just unsure what .001ohms means… is this transducer bad or does .001 mean it is good…
on the transducer there are 2 wires I use those wires for the reading… I thought it would read 2 ohms or around that but it is way lower… so I think there is a short.
You are measuring the DC resistance, what you would want to measure is the impedance at some frequency. When you have capacitive or inductive elements (like a transducer coil) in a circuit, the resistance for AC will be drastically different to the DC resistance (and it will have a frequency dependency, this is what is called impedance, and it is in general a complex function, complex as in complex numbers). Additionally to the purely electrical domain, the physical properties of the entire setup will also have a strong influence on the impedance. Physical resonance frequencies of the transducer can be seen on the electrical impedance.
For loudspeaker transducers, the impedance that is stated in the spec sheet is usually measured at 1kHz. Does the manufacturer specify the frequency at which they measure the impedance?
For reference, this is what the impedance magnitude curve of an exemplary loudspeaker looks like. Your buttkicker will probably have a qualitatively similar curve, just differing numbers.
One way to measure the impedance at a certain frequency is to apply a sinewave with the wanted frequency to the transducer, then measure RMS values of voltage and current. The impedance at the frequency can the be calculated with Ohm’s law:
R=U/I
All that being said, if the DC resistance is actually 0.001Ω, then that seems unusually low.
Found this in my parent’s condo. Dad was an Electrical Engineer. I assume this was one of his gadgets. I’m a Mechanical Engineer…all this EE stuff is PFM to me.
What’s the size/ rating of your UPS? It’s sounding like you’re getting some voltage sag potentially on having so many things plugged into it, so yes, a separate power source for the buttkicker would be best - it could definitely be leading to undervoltage conditions that could’ve fried the electronics.
@Hangar200, that is most definitely a clamp-on ammeter. Much safer and faster for measuring current flow through a conductor or group of conductors.
I did try one last thing and the chair I sit on is a car seat and it has metal rails and I fastened a piece of wood to the chair and base and screwed the transducer to the seat with bolt retainers and bolts…
What this was is the retainer gets a hole drilled in the wood then I insert the retainer and hammer it in the hole for the bolt. the retainers where touching the metal part of the seat and I think when I was getting up it created some either EMF ir static and feedback to the USB Hub…
I just tried getting off the chair a few times but before I yell success I will give it a few more tries but I think I figured out what was going on… maybe that caused the other transducer overtime to malfunction or go bad…
Unlikely, static electricity can damage electronic parts, but not something beefy like a butkicker. My guess would be thermal overload (too much power over an extended period of time will progressively heat up the coil until it fails).