The world's first Bluetooth multimeter - Released by OWON

[testarea]

OWON released a new multimeter with 3 5/6 digitals, come with Bluetooth function to communicate with your smart phone, and can save the data on your phone, a really special feature to multimeter, the video is https://youtu.be/zL9jIUZZbjM

[alexanderbrevig]

That English though

Is this really the worlds first?
I guess test equipment is after basketballs in terms of Bluetooth (intercom) enabling...

[Marco]

What voice synthesis software did they use for this? Or is this just a voice artist doing his best impression of one?

[EEVblog]

Nothing new. Extech and Gossen make Bluetooth meters, and likely others.

[LaurentR]

Nothing new. Extech and Gossen make Bluetooth meters, and likely others.

Fluke 3000FC natively, Fluke 189/287/289 with FC adapter, Keysight U12XX with IR-BT adapter.

[miguelvp]

That English though

At least it is comprehensible, barely but I think I got what they meant.

Was that a computer voice? It sounded a bit artificial but they are getting good.

[dadler]

http://youtu.be/frBnuKeshoM

Reminds me of the videos like this one...

[bitwelder]

e.g. Martin Lorton was using an Extech GX900 that has bluetooth in his latest video:

He's preparing a review of that instrument

[alexanderbrevig]

Was that a computer voice? It sounded a bit artificial but they are getting good.

Listen to by  Kill the Noise. Might not be your cup of dubs, but the voice is all computer generated. The software is extremely expensive though.

Indeed, it's getting good!

Sorry for derailing from topic.

[testarea]

I am sorry, if so, I have to amend that "it is the first bluetooth multimeter made in China" 

[Wytnucls]

No, CEM has had a dozen or so BT meters in their line-up for quite a while.

http://www.cem-instruments.com/en/pro/sort7-1.html

[Dave]

Well, then it's world's first Owon-made Bluetooth meter. Now that is something.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Can they seriously not find a native English speaker to translate from Chinglish?

[Keylectric]

Nothing new. Extech and Gossen make Bluetooth meters, and likely others.

Fluke 3000FC natively, Fluke 189/287/289 with FC adapter, Keysight U12XX with IR-BT adapter.

In the Fluke tech data sheet for ir3000 FC they spec 187 and 789 as well.

[firehopper]

I have one of those ir3000fc devices for my 289, works good actually. the fluke app isnt bad. I did post internal pictures of the irc3000 fc though

[codeboy2k]

Can they seriously not find a native English speaker to translate from Chinglish?

What? and lose this gem:  "The co-analysing hence realizes" 

[codeboy2k]

It almost sounds like they CUT AND PASTED voice clips from the digi-key guy who does the Product Training Modules. 

[Richard Crowley]

Can they seriously not find a native English speaker to translate from Chinglish?

It is claimed that there are more English-speakers in China than there are in the USA.
(And that was back before the Spanish invasion).

But it continues to be remarkable that most Chinese vendors apparently feel no need for competent translation help.

[mubes]

Remarkably, this meter is only about fifty quid in the UK.... Wonder what the quality is like?  I got put onto it by the guys at Coretest up in Lincoln and I'm intrigued.

[drakke]

Can they seriously not find a native English speaker to translate from Chinglish?

I have a theory on this:  They can but they just don't think it is important.

Interesting fact - there are more English speaking people in China than there are in Canada.

[Richard Crowley]

Interesting fact - there are more English speaking people in China than there are in Canada.

Yeah, I have heard that about the US also.
But after the examples we see almost every day, it makes you wonder how they are determining "speaking English"?

One of my favorite documentaries "The Story of English"

[Hydrawerk]

According to this video, Owon is mainly focused on general LCD stuff and not much focused on test equipment.

[ScubaShan]

First? Jaycar have had one in Australia since last year http://www.jaycar.com.au/Test-%26-Measurement/Multimeters/Digital/IP67-True-RMS-Cat-IV-DMM-with-Meterbox-Smartphone-App-/p/QM1576 , its 40000 count and waterproof.

(I have one of those for sale if anyone is interested, $90 in Brisbane!)

[mikeselectricstuff]

Now on Indiegogo - WTF?
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/owon-smart-bluetooth-digital-multimeter

[LaurentR]

Now on Indiegogo - WTF?
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/owon-smart-bluetooth-digital-multimeter

Their selling point is "Meet Your Best Needs. BlueTooth Digital Multimeter free you from your boring working zone!" 

[mswhin63]

I think either they are unsure of the product or they are on the cuff of going broke.

Now on Indiegogo - WTF?
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/owon-smart-bluetooth-digital-multimeter

[Bob F.]

Remarkably, this meter is only about fifty quid in the UK.... Wonder what the quality is like?  I got put onto it by the guys at Coretest up in Lincoln and I'm intrigued.

I'm not sure that it actually exists yet.  They have raised a total of $4 in 12 days on Indiegogo and all I have seen so far is artwork - no actual hardware.  Three sellers on AliExpress have it, but again, have only artwork to show - and all with suspiciously identical adverts.

[Hydrawerk]

What the hell is that. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/owon-smart-bluetooth-digital-multimeter

About Owon
Lilliput steps into electronics industry since 1990. Owned by Lilliput, OWON was born in 2006 to “Meet your best need” in test and measurement equipment field.

After 25 years on market they ask for money???
BTW, there is a prototype.

[charlespax]

I'm still waiting on my Voltset 

[miguelvp]

I don't see a problem with their approach.

Using IGG as a focus group to green light a project using fixed funding so if there is not enough interest it will be a no-go.

Plus early adopters get a discount and they can measure if there is interest (which it appears it doesn't)

Although I don't like their lottery that out of every 100 $3 supporters (for a total of $300) 4 will get a $34 meter ($136, or $160 value) That makes the cost of those meters double the price.

Actually I see this as an innovative approach for an established company to introduce a new product.

[poorchava]

Most of our company's measurement instruments have some sort of wireless connectivity. Nearly all have our proprietary RF interface on 433MHz ISM band for firmware updates (cheaper to achieve IP67 rating than using connectors) and higher models also have WiFi and Bluetooth. We don't do multimeters though.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Android system Bluetooth Multimeter cannot connect to iPhone. And vice versa.

Why can't one multimeter connect to both Android and iPhone? It doesn't seem to be available for Windows PCs either.

From the lukewarm start of the campaign it would seem that BT is not popular. Or is is just not a very inspiring meter.

Apple have some stupid restrictions on what Bluetooth devices you're allowed to use, so this is probably the reason - normal SPP for Android, some nasty bodge, probably HID keyboard emulation for Apple.

[EEVblog]

Owon have an Indiegogo for this meter?
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/owon-smart-bluetooth-digital-multimeter
 

[DanielS]

Was that a computer voice? It sounded a bit artificial but they are getting good.

I think it was text-to-speech. I doubt any english speaker who speaks this well would be able to speak out the ridiculous grammatical errors as-is without skipping a beat.

[free_electron]

buletooth ?

[CarolineChanning]

What the hell is that. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/owon-smart-bluetooth-digital-multimeter

About Owon
Lilliput steps into electronics industry since 1990. Owned by Lilliput, OWON was born in 2006 to “Meet your best need” in test and measurement equipment field.

After 25 years on market they ask for money???

It's a normal marketing methods.Just because raising money doesn't mean they are lack of money. No need to put much concern about this, we should focus on their quality. As your video shows, it works fine. Maybe they should release more video to show other operation examples.

[miguelvp]

$38 USD raised by 3 people in 13 days with 47 days left
And $34 of those are from Robin Chen (the indiegogo campaign owner)

I can't find Mr. Chen's affiliation to OWON to see if this is just somebody that got their hands on the material trying to raise the money to keep it, but at the rate is growing I don't think it matters, they only really rased $4 in 13 days.

Btw OWON is so tiny that they don't even have a wiki page.

[ivan747]

Most of our company's measurement instruments have some sort of wireless connectivity. Nearly all have our proprietary RF interface on 433MHz ISM band for firmware updates (cheaper to achieve IP67 rating than using connectors) and higher models also have WiFi and Bluetooth. We don't do multimeters though.

Funny how implementing digital RF communications is cheaper than a simple (well, waterproof) connector these days. Nothing beats IR though.

[EEVblog]

Btw OWON is so tiny that they don't even have a wiki page.

Looks big enough to me:
http://www.owon.com.hk/about.asp?InID=66

Rigol for example only has about 400 employees, and that includes production staff.

[Bob F.]

BTW, there is a prototype.

Thanks Hydrawerk - they have added a fair bit more detail since I first looked at it.  It now looks like a much more interesting proposition.  Think I'll keep an eye on it for now...

Cheers, Bob.

[baoblackcoal]

BTW, there is a prototype.

Thanks Hydrawerk - they have added a fair bit more detail since I first looked at it.  It now looks like a much more interesting proposition.  Think I'll keep an eye on it for now...

Cheers, Bob.

Hi Bob,
update operation video yesterday, you can have a look.

[Bob F.]

Owon have the meter and link to the Indiegogo campaign on their website, so it does look like a legit project from their home office:  http://www.owon.com.hk/about_n.asp?SortID=33&NewsID=223.

Tho, taking the 34USD price-point and the 1000V/CatIII printing on the front in combination, I can only imaging what Dave will have to say if he ever gets the opportunity to open up a production model...

They do not appear to have done any marketing - these kinds of campaigns usually have a list of links to articles at the bottom where you can read about it on various tech blogs that they have sent press releases to - nothing here.

Hmmm, I'm beginning to sound like a shill for the company so I'll pipe down now...

Cheers, Bob.

[mackrc1]

Using crowdfunding is a neat way to measure the interest in the market for such a device and is actually pretty clever of Owon, their oscilloscopes used to be pretty good, I say used to be because with the release of the DS1054Z you'd be mad to get one.
The meter itself looks pretty average but for the price and the included bluetooth functionality it has the potential to own the hobby market (providing they get it right of course). The most interesting comment I found on the indiegogo page was this in the 'challenges we face': " 1. Improve the Accuracy of the Multimeter, this is the most important issue we and our customer concern about. We are going to make it more accurate. "
It certainly has potential.

[Ross Wassie]

I think it's fun with these functions. Actually, I am fresh in this field. Just find its spec original.

[baoblackcoal]

I think it's fun with these functions. Actually, I am fresh in this field. Just find its spec original.

I think the Bluetooth multimeter is the most cost-effective 3(5/6) Bluetooth multimete in the world . monitoring a plurality of multimeter at the same time and the remote control of  functions is a very innovative idea .

[mubes]

I'm very confused what the status is of these meters.  Coretest here in the UK have just sent me pricing and told me they're available as follows;

D35       Digital Multimeter, Data Logger, DMM, Temp Meter                               £34 + 6.99 delivery +vat
D35T      Digital Multimeter, Data Logger, DMM, Temp Meter, True RMS                     £38 + 6.99 delivery +vat
B35       Digital Multimeter, Data Logger, DMM, Temp Meter, Bluetooth                    £40 + 6.99 delivery +vat
B35T      Digital Multimeter, Data Logger, DMM, Temp Meter, Bluetooth, True RMS          £44 + 6.99 delivery +vat

...at these prices my expectations aren't the highest, but I've ordered a B35T to see what it's like. Will report back.

DAVE

[baoblackcoal]

Disassembly Video:
Operation Video:

[mubes]

Meter arrived just now, so they do exist. Watch this space....

[5ky]

Speaking of bluetooth, have you guys seen the user agreement for the Keysight iOS app for the bluetooth adapter?  What exactly do you think this means?  That it's not legal for me to "review" the app because that's considered "evaluation"?  (the part I'm talking about is the first sentence in the second paragraph)  That sounds like it's denying me my freedom of speech.  I buy a product, and download the companion app for it for free, and I'm not allowed to speak about it?     Hopefully I'm just interpreting this incorrectly.  I made a twitter account just to tweet them about this and no response yet.

[5ky]

nobody? 

[amirm]

My read agrees with yours.  You can't evaluate it or say anything negative about it.

I am pretty sure this is legal.  I have dealt with many products that had anti-review provisions.  This is a license to you and if you don't like the terms, you don't have to accept the license.  It is not free speech issue.

Says he as a non-lawyer who has spent a ton of time with corporate lawyers. 

[5ky]

My read agrees with yours.  You can't evaluate it or say anything negative about it.

I am pretty sure this is legal.  I have dealt with many products that had anti-review provisions.  This is a license to you and if you don't like the terms, you don't have to accept the license.  It is not free speech issue.

Says he as a non-lawyer who has spent a ton of time with corporate lawyers. 

Sneaky snakes.  I buy a product with my hard earned money, and in order to utilize it, you have to use their companion software (else it's just a bluetooth adapter that serves no purpose without something on the receiving end to receive the data), and due to a clause in their EULA, nobody is allowed to review it?  That's such horsesh*t.  Hopefully other companies don't jump on this bandwagon, else gone are the days of the informed consumer.

EDIT: typos

[amirm]

I should add that the provision is usually in there to stop a competitor from buying the product, testing it, then bad-mouthing it in their marketing material.  I doubt very much that anyone would knock on your door for evaluating the product as a person, not connected with any company.

[5ky]

I should add that the provision is usually in there to stop a competitor from buying the product, testing it, then bad-mouthing it in their marketing material.  I doubt very much that anyone would knock on your door for evaluating the product as a person, not connected with any company.

Hopefully not, but I'm not going to find out lol. 

They lost out on free advertisement.  (I've used it a little bit already and it seems legit)

[amirm]

Bought one of these when I saw this thread and it arrived a couple of days ago from China.

Good news.  It has a nice large display with good white backlight.  The selector switch is pretty light but very usable and I like that I can easily turn it.  Update speed looks good.

Not so good news.  The backlight has a super short timer.  And the continuity detector with stock probes is worse than horrible.  You can short the probes and half the time nothing happens.  The other half, it may latch in a second or two.  I suspect the probe is responsible for a lot of this as when you short them in ohm settings, it reads all kinds of values until settling down to one ohm or so. 

Anyway, I didn't buy it to have another multimeter added to my collection .  I wanted it for data logging remotely.  Went to look for the Android app and could not find it in the google play market.  Read the doc and it says it an .apk from their site!  Go and download the thing, override Android security to install it and the system shows a boatload of permissions it is asking for including my phone id!  And system access. No way as heck am I going to install some software from China that has not gone through audit of Google for malicious software.

I know it is some pain to go through Google and Apple certification but either do that, or cut down on the permissions it is requesting.  I think it had 6 to 8 things it wanted to access.  Little of that should be required to just talk to a bluetooth device.

I am going to find an old tablet to maybe use with it.  Failing that, it is going to sit in the drawer for now .

[3roomlab]

i think they are hyping up themselves based on the success of mooshimeter? they think that "kid" could do it, we are a bigger entity, we can make more waves? trying to use web trends to "create" a world first which isnt really a world first  . there are so many new users in WWW and it is so easy to dupe them into believing that they are seeing a "world first" ... 

*edit : so that APK did not go thru std google site, how much does a license costs to get it sitting on google play?

[amirm]

As far as I recall for Android it is just a $25 one-time signup fee.  After that, for a free app like this, there is no expense.  So there is no reason than not wanting to put in the effort to get it into their store.

[Hydrawerk]

The input protection looks poor. I seriously doubt it is 1000V CAT III. 

[Wartex]

Can they seriously not find a native English speaker to translate from Chinglish?

I have a theory on this:  They can but they just don't think it is important.

Interesting fact - there are more English speaking people in China than there are in Canada.

Interesting fact - there is more mandarin speakers in Vancouver than in entire china.

[codeboy2k]

Interesting fact - there is more mandarin speakers in Vancouver than in entire china.

I'm not sure about that fact.  It seems unlikely since 70% of the population of China speaks Mandarin(2013 data from [1]), and the population in 2013 was estimated at 1.354 billion people[2]. That means as of 2013, 947 million people speak Mandarin in China.  For Vancouver, we only have census data for 2011, but "In 2011, Metro Vancouver had a population of 2,313,328 living in 949,565 dwellings" [3].  So you either trolled me good or you've been mis-informed yourself

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/world/asia/china-400-million-cannot-speak-mandarin.html?_r=0
[2] http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/china-population-2013/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Vancouver

By the way, Vancouver has bilingual education in Mandarin/English starting at Kindergarten [4], and continuing bilingual Mandarin/English through grade school [5].  That page says it continues in high-school too.  There is also bilingual education offered here at our colleges [6]

[4] http://www.vsb.bc.ca/programs/early-mandarin-bilingual
[5] https://www.vsb.bc.ca/programs/mandarin-bilingual
[6] http://langara.ca/continuing-studies/programs-and-courses/programs/mandarin-school/

[simba15]

Bought one of these when I saw this thread and it arrived a couple of days ago from China.

Good news.  It has a nice large display with good white backlight.  The selector switch is pretty light but very usable and I like that I can easily turn it.  Update speed looks good.

Not so good news.  The backlight has a super short timer.  And the continuity detector with stock probes is worse than horrible.  You can short the probes and half the time nothing happens.  The other half, it may latch in a second or two.  I suspect the probe is responsible for a lot of this as when you short them in ohm settings, it reads all kinds of values until settling down to one ohm or so. 

Anyway, I didn't buy it to have another multimeter added to my collection .  I wanted it for data logging remotely.  Went to look for the Android app and could not find it in the google play market.  Read the doc and it says it an .apk from their site!  Go and download the thing, override Android security to install it and the system shows a boatload of permissions it is asking for including my phone id!  And system access. No way as heck am I going to install some software from China that has not gone through audit of Google for malicious software.

I know it is some pain to go through Google and Apple certification but either do that, or cut down on the permissions it is requesting.  I think it had 6 to 8 things it wanted to access.  Little of that should be required to just talk to a bluetooth device.

I am going to find an old tablet to maybe use with it.  Failing that, it is going to sit in the drawer for now .

Amirm,

Did you ever try a new set of Leads with this meter?

Also do you still have the apk from their site? the new Google Play version has some updates that are not desired. If so please let me know if you can upload a copy.

Is there a better meter with this same price/ features (bluetooth datalog)?

Thanks Tristan

[amirm]

Hi Tristan.  I loaned the unit to my brother so don't have it to test anymore. 

I did get a "Redfish" Bluetooth meter which works excellently other than the garbage probes which I replaced with Probemaster.  It is more expensive though so not sure if it fits your needs.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013FBA2UI/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1