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It's a low cost device for hobbyists who want to test their arduinos. The fact that it can't be used with a 240v source is irrelevant. If its safety limits are improperly marked, then you have a valid criticism.

You sound like you really just have a problem with electronics hobbyist amateurs who deign to intrude on your actual qualified electrical engineer grandeur. Get over it.

Not at all. Watch someone get electrocuted through shitty test equipment or a poor earth and you'll get the idea.

Doesn't matter if it's an Arduino connected to a PC with an earth fault or a $30000 scope.

People just don't GET electrical safety and it's a really big problem.

It's nothing to do with grandeur - it's understanding the whole problem.

Uh huh. I'm an EE and I'm calling your BS.

It's fine for people to use PCs (and lamps and toasters and blenders) even though they might have earth faults. It's fine for people to charge their phones even though there's a nonzero chance they'll use a counterfeit charger. And it's perfectly fine for people to probe 5V circuits using a $15.00 multimeter.

If you're really claiming that everyone needs a $400 Fluke before they can probe the circuit they just soldered together then I can only guess that you're really hurting for work?

I think bananas' point is that the Fluke brand means something important (even if a $15 multimeter can do the job, a Fluke is better), so it is worthwhile to protect that brand for people who do care about this stuff.

You're right. If he had said that then I would agree (as long as the brand protection isn't too sweeping... I remember a story about Fluke trying to claim the big-knob-on-the-front-of-a-handheld form factor, dunno how true it was).

For people who care, this is why Flukes (and Agilents and good DMMs) are worth the money: http://www.eevblog.com/2012/10/19/eevblog-373-multimeter-inp...

But not everybody needs that. If kids want to to make a battery powered 555 drive an LED, do they need to wait until their parents can afford a Fluke? Or risk death? That seems to be what bananas is saying.

Sorry to correct myself that's not what I'm saying. To break it down:

1. Fluke have a right to protect their brand identity, which since 1988 approximately involved a yellow rubber case for their portable DMMs

2. A $15 multimeter is a pile of crap whatever you do and isn't suitable for anything other than battery powered circuitry as you state. I'd even question its value for that. It's useful for approximating but not measuring. It shouldn't be let near anything directly or indirectly mains connected even if it has a 240V AC range on the dial regardless though.

3. A $50-100 multimeter is however a safer investment. Even a bottom to mid-range Amprobe or Ex-tech will do the job fine and not put you at risk.

I can't afford three Fluke meters but I will use the Fluke for anything where risk is likely or I need accurate measurements. If I need to take more than one simultaneous measurement I will delegate the less critical ones to a couple of $80 Amprobe meters I use.

Perhaps a more pertinent question, is: are your kids worth $15 or $50 for safety equipment?

And I call BS on you. People do get electrocuted when dealing with toasters and other home electronics on a somewhat regular basis. "The Consumer Products Safety Commission estimates that on average 15 people are electrocuted in the U.S. annually due to faulty or misused home electrical appliances, including toasters."

So you don't use toasters?

No, but I do recognize they can be dangerous and so take reasonable precautions like unplugging them before trying to get toast out with a butter knife etc. 120v rarely kills people, but saying that does not mean it's 'safe'. https://xkcd.com/795/

You've totally missed the point. Yes toasters can kill people, but statistically very few deaths are by toaster. That's why as a society we've decided the useful convenience of toasters outweighs their inherent dangers. Similarly, we've decided that really cheap meters are beneficial enough to outweigh the slight possibility that someone might measure a too-high voltage while using the meter as an eyeshield or baby toy or something.

Safety is far from a binary thing. People used to build extremely unsafe toasters that changed over time in large part to government rules and regulations. We accept cars and trucks killing 30,000+ people in the US every year, but even that number is much smaller than it could if we let company's sell cars like they where designed in the 1950's or let people drive like they did back then.

We accept that cheap electronics are going to be somewhat less safe, but we don't accept people selling cheap electronics leaching off the reputations of high-quality brands. Not just because it can kill people but it also creates bad incentives where there is little point in creating quality if nobody can tell the difference.

And no they did not just randomly chose to have a yellow back it's a deliberate imitation of a quality product which could easily cause confusion in the marketplace and kill someone.

This subthread is about "safety", not trademarks. IANAIPL, and I have no opinion about what color the various cheap-ass meters I have used should be. If someone is too confused to contrast the letters comprising "Fluke" from those comprising "Mastech" or whatever, that someone is too confused to be metering circuits.

For my edification, can you point out one example of a human being who was killed while using a cheap meter, who would have been unharmed if using a precious Fluke?

I'd still like to be edified. How about one example of a human being who was injured in any way while using a cheap meter, who would have been unharmed if using a precious Fluke?

That has nothing to do with the trademark issue at hand, and no one is cheering for the demise of Fluke (the post is actually very complimentary of Fluke products).

For people working with 5V circuits (e.g. Arduinos), you don't need to worry about AC power killing you or your multimeter exploding. A cheap multimeter is OK in a pinch.

Until you connect your Arduino's USB cable to your computer which is on a faulty earth and then realise that you have 100-240v going through your mains, to your computer case, up your USB cable, through your meter, up your arm, across your chest, down your desk leg and back to earth...

The potential difference between the 5v and GND on your Ardunio might be 5v but between your Arduino GND and real earth might be 180v floating.

Believe me that shit is scary and will kill you.

I'd rather people blew $250 on a meter and actually read up on electrical safety to be honest. If that's prohibitive, you're welcome to kill yourself through ignorance.

Why stop at multimeters, though? I mean, what would happen if you connected a USB drive "to your computer which is on a faulty earth and then realise that you have 100-240v going through your mains, to your computer case, up your USB cable, through your [hand], up your arm, across your chest, down your desk leg and back to earth". Clearly anyone selling $15 USB drives is endangering their customers and we should all buy $250 safety-rated ones.

In that case your computer is a death trap certain to cause fatal electrical shock the next time you connect your printer, flash drive, or USB nerf missile launcher. Your expensive multimeter probably won't save you in time (seriously though, do you test the grounding of your computer case every time you use it?)

> your computer which is on a faulty earth ... to your computer case

This can certainly happen and is indeed dangerous, but if the first time you find out is while experimenting with a USB peripheral on a test bench (as opposed to say resting your bare legs on the case), you should consider yourself lucky.

If you really are worried about getting killed while working on your electrical projects? spend $20 on a GFCI outlet or pdu. that's a life-saver. If your work bench doesn't have a gfci in the wall, go to home depot or whatever, and you can get a power strip that has GFCI functionality.

Note, from my understanding, the GFCI will provide some protection even if you only have two prongs; it monitors the hot and the neutral.

http://home.howstuffworks.com/question117.htm

They're a last line of defence to prevent persistent electrocution, burns and lock on.

They still take 130-500ms to trip which is more than enough to knock you into VF (that only takes 3ms).

Prevention is always the best approach.

I think it's fairly likely that someone who is using this multimeter while working with e.g. Arduinos, would be the type of person who, when some piece of electronic equipment in their home isn't working, would say "I have this multimeter, let me check and see if there's voltage on the outlet"

This is exactly what a trademark is intended for. If I started a home goods store called "Home Hut", and made the logo a large orange square... i'd also be infringing, and for good reason. Home depot has built a reputation, and that trade mark orange is representative of that reputation.

And if I start a home improvement store using a tomatoish orange and call it "Bob's Home Store" would that also fall afoul of trademark in your book?

In the case of the DMM in question, it's not direct knock-off of a Fluke and according to SF the color is more of an orange-yellow than the Fluke safety yellow. SF's whole point is that the TM terms are too vague. Gray with a yellow border. What shade of gray? What shade of yellow? I don't get to claim a whole primary color and say you can make a DMM using any color even close to this.

"All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your arm and you're dead. "

It seems to me that you are not a qualified electrical engineer. Those three words are incompatible with the above statement.

Probably you are engineer, when I come from in Europe this title means something serious, but in other countries means very little.

But qualified you are not.

I AM electrical engineer and you don't know what you are talking about.

In my country we say that it is easier to catch a liar than a gammy person.

I'm curious what you think about his statement was wrong. Don't dumb it down, I'm an electrical engineer too :)

Deaths do happen at low voltage. They aren't very common, but they are possible, and faulty test equipment is a serious problem: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/98-131/pdfs/98-131.pdf

So, since the design[1] and construction of a multimeter is important (I wholeheartedly agree), do you simply look for ones that have a yellow border with a dark face, and trust that this implies they're well made? Or might you look for the actual trademark 'FLUKE', and even buy from a reputable distributor to avoid outright counterfeits?

Personally I'm not a Fluke junkie, and think there's plenty of reputable mid-range meters that will protect you just fine. However I also think that a distributor-branded direct-import is not likely to be one of these.

But as far as trademarks, we're really talking about two quite functional colors here - a neutral-colored face for readability, and a bright shroud on the other sides for visibility. Many meters have been using these color styles for quite some time and, as your loyalty to Fluke illustrates, this does little to dilute their brand.

[1] Electronic design, as would be implied by the context if not for confusion induced by graphic/industrial designers thinking they have a monopoly on the term.

I'm not a Fluke junkie either, but I don't buy the "functional colors" argument. Nobody made a multimeter that looked like that until Fluke started doing it. Fluke also makes a range of "intrinsically safe" multimeters with a red instead of orange border. Are those less "functional?" They are certainly less well-known, so it wouldn't make sense to copy them.

It's the same as the cheapo "bench" multimeters that have five input terminals and the same layout as an Agilent 344xxA (or Fluke 88xx) but don't have a 4-wire Ohms function (or even a low-enough range to need 4-wire Ohms) or a proper guard connection (which is the purpose of the the 5th terminal).

Blind brand loyalty isn't always a good thing, especially over the span of 20+ years where you stop even testing the alternatives. Technology advances FAST. You say nothing about having actually evaluated the cheaper alternatives in person? Are you sure that despite exponential increases in technology that prices haven't come down at all?

Are you sure about the true production costs, if you eliminate the 20 layers of middlemen and are only paying the 10cents / hour miners + 20cents / hour workers? This is a finance / markets question, not an engineering question.

Lots of strong emotions, not so sure about the evidence. Technology and cost of technology never stops advancing. Numerous large companies are guilty of price-fixing, e.g. the large-scale monitor price-fixing scandals from a few years ago. Bet you never even heard of those cases?

Parts sourcing is part of engineering. He is right, well designed high voltage protection is not going to be cheap, and these meters are obviously not designed with anything but digital testbench in mind.

High voltage doesn't automatically mean expensive. We're talking about low-speed battery-powered equipment whose only I/O is through buttons and an LCD, not something like a USB oscilloscope that needs high-speed galvanic isolation. Getting the details (shrouding, creepage, plastics) right (and keeping them that way) is going to take design time and vigilant QA, but the parts themselves aren't inherently expensive.

No. Parts sourcing is not even close to getting your pals that you know at the factory to slip in a custom assembly run, just paying the absolutely minimal costs and nearly 100% of the money going to the very bottom $1/hour end-workers.

There's an assumption that price=quality. That's ok, until we get into the extreme cases. We're talking about the extreme limits of how cheaply this could be done. The prices of the raw materials are not high, they're not made of solid gold or rare-earth materials. Assembly costs almost nothing.

We're talking about the extreme limits of how cheaply this could be done.

When was the last time you trusted your life to something that boldly tested the limits of that edge?

Every day? You think the products you use every day aren't maximized for profit?

To a company with a presence & reputation in the American market, "profit" consideres reputation and repeat customers. To a fly-by-night foreign company with no name, "profit" begins and ends at the point of sale.

> To a company with a presence & reputation in the American market, "profit" consideres reputation and repeat customers.

Not true. Think about all those telcos, ISPs, car producers, etc. that just sell bad products and services, don't give a damn about their customers and still profit. Unfortunately, business at large figured out how to be malicious to customers without losing money.

Analog technology evolves very slowly relative to what you're thinking of.

Go buy some Chinese-brand tires from Walmart. I'm sure they're just cheaper because they cut out the middlemen and aren't selling a name. They certainly won't blow out after 8000 miles.

I used to think to you, until I moved across the world to a place where people make $1/hour (where I'm still residing now.) Tons of extremely high-quality products for cheap, that I've never seen in the US. Turns out that assuming Walmart is the end-all to low price goods was completely wrong.

Prices are set to maximize profit. Everywhere. Even at Walmart. Especially at Walmart.

On the bright side, the people reading sparkfun and getting pissed at fluke, probably never would have bought a fluke anyway, so no tremendous loss here. The market for $15 meters and fluke meters doesn't overlap much. It's been a while since I shopped DMMs, but isn't their entry-level meter ~$250?

Hell, even the guy who wrote the original article isn't in Fluke's target market apparently: "I’ve never had the opportunity to own a Fluke-branded DMM"

  All it takes is a miswired socket, earth fault or short
  in a power supply and you've got 110-240v going up your
  arm and you're dead. Either that or the meter explodes,
  removing your fingers or spraying bits of plastic and
  metal into your eyes.

If these are a serious danger I think people should be better informed. I'd like to make a youtube video demonstrating the problem. I have a £15 multimeter [1] and 240v residential mains electricity. How would I go about demonstrating the problem?

[1] http://www.toolstation.com/shop/Hand+Tools/Electricians+Tool...

Plug a cheap, transformerless, USB charger into a socket that's wired backwards, and touch the shield of the connector by accident when plugging it into your cell phone

But where does the £15 multimeter fit into that?

measuring the potential between the shield and your tongue... I (maybe inaccurately) read the parent comment as "If miswired sockets REALLY are a hazard to people messing around with 5V electronics, prove it"

How can you approve any company just patenting a multimeter with a gray front and a yellow back.

Get real that is very common color scheme for multimeters and it is an unrealistic expectation of Fluke that everybody associates that to their products only.

Case and point how many gray and yellow multimeters can you see here [1]?

[1] www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=multimeters

Basically, there's a kind of romanticisation of Fluke multimeters in the electrical and electronics community as the only decent multimeter and their appearance as incredibly distinctive. This supposed distinctive appearance never seems to have existed - Flukes from any given era look far more similar to all the other multimeters and electronics from that era than to newer or older Flukes - but people believe it anyway, most likely because they rarely come across other multimeters.

In this case the entire design (color, shape, etc) is nearly identical to my Fluke meter. I'm sure they're not going after every yellow and gray meter on the market. These are clearly designed to look just like a Fluke meter

They all look the same to me a small curve it's not going to make much difference.

And it's not like it has the Fluke logo on it or anything.

It certainly doesn't have the fluke logo on it, but as someone who uses yellow multimeters fairly regularly (Fluke and otherwise) I immediately (and possibly mistakenly) recognized the design (shape, color, the specific rotary switch used) as that of the particular model Fluke multimeter I have in my drawer. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I own two yellow multimeters and only one is a Fluke)

This is only because of the brand success of Fluke and they want to be associated with it. But it's a dangerous bridge to cross.

It's a bit late to enforce it now then isn't it?

It's not associated with your brand anymore.

I for one never associated that color scheme with that brand didn't even hear of Fluke before this but i did associate it with multimeters in general.

So what's the point of defending something you don't even own anymore.

They didn't patent a multimeter with a gray front and yellow back. I don't think that is even patentable. You should really study the relevant facts of an issue well before forming such strong feelings about it.