Circuit Lake

Electronic Project and Circuit Collection

Low Picofarad Capacitance Meter

08/31/2011 Category: AVR, Ham Radio, Measurement, Microcontroller, Project, Tools

This little instrument, named as Pico C, can be used to measure capacitances down to fractions of a picofarad. It built based on ATtiny2313 microcontroller. It has range: <1 pF to 2000 pF (guaranteed); 2500 pF possible and resolution: 0.1 pF. To read the result, this low cost C meter comes with 2 lines LCD. The project is easy to calibrate with 1000pF 1% reference capacitor.

Low Capacitor - Picofarad Capacitance Meter


This tiny capacitance meter is good tools for RF designers and radio amateurs. Since many built-in capacitance meter digital multimeters comes with lowest measuring range of 2000 pF. Although at 3.5 digits the DMM’s resolution is 1 pF, any measurement below 200 pF or so will produce coarse if not ridiculous results.