Electron Plus CTL 503... opinions?

[pizzigri]

Hello!
I was looking around for a cheap or DIY curve tracer, and found this device from Electron Plus. I could not find a teardown, opinion or anything really here on EEVblog.....

https://www.saelig.com/product/ct503.htm

Anyone here has one and would like to share some info, good bad and maybe the guts of it?
Considering that it’s either an octopus, or the Peak or.... huge + expensive Tek monsters, and really nothing in between
Franco

[Kean]

I don't have any experience with this unit but there seems to be a lack of documentation, even on the main product website.  Maybe it is quite newly released, but I expect a bit more from test equipment user manuals than some software setup instructions.
https://electron.plus/product/ctl503-curve-tracer

The owner of Electron Plus is a member of the EEVblog forum with user name "fcb", and hopefully he will chime in.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/profile/?u=25995

I have a Peak DCA75 which is pretty good.  It is a bit limited in comparison, but good enough for my occasional needs.

[cncjerry]

I've been looking at curve tracers again after building the one from QST years ago that is excellent.  I was recently contacted by someone about my QST build so I was looking around again.  The issue with this one, if it is the same one I checked out, was that the maximum current was low and I can't remember what the max voltage was but I think that was low as well.

there is a pretty cool Arduino project around and that has current up to 50ma and max 12v but the voltage can be increased with the right opamps to 18v.  But the arduino project doesnt do negative voltages.

Anyway, all these tracers can get curves but are they displaying accurate values or just relative?  and does it matter since most time you are just matching.  One other point, there is a step generator type on eBay that someone gave me, it works well, and costs about 1/3 this one.  That one works with a scope.

[pizzigri]

Hey Jerry, that was me!
Yes I am interested in both a good Diy and a product, one for learning and one —- well if I cant get it to work obviously...

[slugrustle]

I'm curious if anyone has tried out one of these.

[Ancato]

I just bought the Electron Plus CTL503 a few days ago and I am quite happy with the functionality, after some initial trouble.
The max current (3A) and max voltage (100V) makes CTL503 more capable than other curve tracers that I have (Atlas DCA75 Pro & a selfmade Arduino based curve tracer).
Here are my thoughts after a few hours of playing around with the instrument.

Pros:
The max voltage and current: 100V and 3 A.
Both continuous and pulsed mode operation.
The CTL503 seems to handle NPN/PNP, NFET/PFET, Diode and SCR (I have only tested different NPN transistors so far).
All parameters that I can think of can be easily adjusted from the user interface.
The reult data seems to be very precise. There is also a calibration procedure that I havent tested yet.
All data from each run is saved in a text-file.

Cons:
The documentation is unfortunatly still pretty much non existing, see: https://electron.plus/pages/manuals
There are still no reviews or information about the Electron Plus CTL503 on Internet.
The user interface is a bit buggy (the 64-bit version of the sofware was very unstable for me - the 32-bit version works better).
I miss the possibility to see exact data values with "mouse over" on the curves.