I know these have been discussed before, but I've bought myself one of the cheap ESR meters to help re-cap a monitor and thought a note might be in order.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001224736909.htmlThe MESR-100 specifically describes itself as using a low voltage signal, making it suitable for in-circuit investigation:
Accuracy: Up to 1% (detail on above table)
Wide Measurement Range: >1uF
High Resolution: 4 digit, or 0.001Ohm @ 1 Ω range
Measuring voltage: <~40mV RMS (TESTING VOLTAGE)
It has a USB connection for power but I don't believe it has any logging/capture capability.
Open circuit, the test signal is roughly sinusoidal with about 0.4V peak-to-peak at about 170Hz.
Across a new 220uF 50V cap, the signal is somewhat more triangular and reduces to around 4.4mV peak-to-peak at about 115Hz.
Both of the above are auto-ranged, I've not investigated manual mode/range selection.
I believe I saw discussion of one of these meters while I was shopping around, possibly on Hackaday, which emphasised that they really didn't like being given longer leads. TBH, since they're going to be used on deenergised equipment and usually flat on the bench I don't see the length as being a problem, I would however be tempted to replace the supplied crocodile clips with copper stubs which could be attached with a deft dab of solder: doing that would result in a good connection but would still be much easier and potentially less destructive than removing every cap for testing.
MarkMLl