Iain's Electronics Page

Using a Multimeter

Measuring Voltage

To measure voltage on a battery.This is an example of a 1.4 AA battery.

• black goes to the negative and red to the positive or knobbley end.
• make sure black lead is in COM on the multimeter
• make sure red lead is in V on the multimeter
• connecting in correctly will result in a negative number
• the numbers in the V section are the range in mA.
• using the 200mA will result in 1364 or 1.364 Volts

Measuring Voltage of a Circuit

Below we have a circuit with a battery, resister and LED.

Here would be the circuit diagram.

In circuit is said to be in series as one component follows another. We can measure the voltage across any one of the components individually. To measure you connect the multiimeter in parallel which means you put the probes either side of the component. This is said to be measuring in parallel. As usual the black goes to black (negative).

Example of measuring the voltage of the LED.

In our case they measured

• 2.83 battery
• 2.3 led
• 0.64 Resister

Which means the voltage of the led and resister = voltage of the battery.