Neil Narwani and his team of electrical engineers at FOVEA have been working with electronics long enough to remember when pin pitches were wider and probing their circuit boards was easier. Multimeters proved to be a growing frustration - electronics keep getting smaller but it feels like the meters are still built to measure the large circuits of old. Too often a probe can slip to the next pin and cause a short at a critical time in development. Their solution was to develop their own multimeter, able to be worn on the wrist and give the user much easier to read measurements, directly in their field of vision. FOVEA, the Field of View Embedded Analyzer, is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund its first run of parts.
Voltage range is 0-30 Volts DC, current 0-1 Amperes DC, and resistance range 0-1 Megaohm. The frequency counter runs between 0 and 10 Megahertz and pulse generator between 0-100 Megahertz. The 2.4 inch thin film transistor touch screen is the user interface, and the unit has four banana jacks and 4-pin interface.
FOVEA looks like a fantastic tool to help makers and technicians work without damaging their projects. This Kickstarter campaign is very straightforward frank discussion about the device, the team's progress to this point, and what still needs to be done. Definitely feels to me like an engineer who's written a status report of a project. One interesting addition is that after feedback obtained from user tests and Maker Faires, the team is developing a finger mounted display to take the idea of FOVEA even closer to the probe. The finger expansion piece will interface will be added later. The campaign is not yet successful and ends on June 16, 2019.