The multimeter is the most purchased and least understood tool in electronics. Millions sit in drawers because the dial looks like a secret code. At its core, a multimeter is three instruments in one: a voltmeter, an ammeter, and an ohmmeter. Everything else—continuity, diode testing, capacitance—builds on those three. Voltage measures electrical pressure between two points. A nine-volt battery that reads below 7.5 volts under no load is dead, not "maybe usable." Continuity mode is the entry point for most repairs: it checks whether electricity can flow through a path. Touch two probes together, hear a beep, and you can diagnose a blown fuse, a broken wire, or a cracked circuit board trace in seconds—without understanding Ohm's law. Resistance measurement tells you if a component has drifted out of spec, shorted, or gone open. Always measure resistance with power off. Current measurement is the most dangerous mode: you must break the circuit and insert the meter in series. Leave the probe in the current jack and touch a voltage source, and you'll blow the fuse—or worse. The difference between a $20 meter and a $150 Fluke comes down to input impedance (10 megaohms vs 1, which affects readings on sensitive circuits), True RMS (essential for non-sine-wave signals like PWM fans), and safety ratings (CAT III for breaker panels, CAT I for low-voltage electronics). A cheap meter can lie to you in the exact situations where you need accuracy most.
#3057: Decoding the Multimeter: What That Dial Actually Does
Learn what a multimeter actually does beyond voltage—continuity, resistance, current, and how to avoid blowing it up.
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New to the show? Start here#3057: Decoding the Multimeter: What That Dial Actually Does
Daniel sent us this one — he says the multimeter is the tool everyone's told to buy but almost nobody's told how to actually use. He's got one sitting in a drawer somewhere, and he wants to know: what do these things actually do beyond measuring voltage, what can you use them for, and what do you get when you step up from a twenty-dollar meter to something that costs real money? Which, honestly, is the question behind the question for a lot of people getting into electronics repair.
It really is. The multimeter is probably the most purchased and least understood tool in all of electronics. Millions of them sitting in drawers — people bought one because a YouTube tutorial said they needed it, took it out of the box, looked at the dial with all those symbols, and just... put it back. The manual that comes with most of these things reads like it was translated through three languages by someone who's never held a probe.
The Rosetta Stone of bad technical writing.
So let's fix that. At its core, a multimeter is three instruments in one box — a voltmeter, an ammeter, and an ohmmeter. It measures voltage, current, and resistance. Everything else — continuity, diode testing, capacitance, frequency — is built on top of those three. Think of it as the Swiss Army knife of electrical measurement, except unlike a Swiss Army knife, most people only ever open the main blade and ignore the other eleven tools.
The main blade here is voltage. That's the one mode people figure out because it's the most intuitive — stick the probes on something, see a number. But even that has traps built in.
When you set your meter to DC volts — that's the V with a straight line and a dashed line above it — you're measuring the electrical pressure between two points. For a nine-volt battery, you'd set the meter to the twenty-volt DC range, touch red to positive and black to negative, and you should see somewhere around nine volts. If it reads below seven and a half volts under no load, that battery is dead. Not "maybe it'll work in a smoke detector for another week" — it's done.
That seven-and-a-half-volt threshold is one of those things nobody tells you. You'd think nine volts means nine volts.
Right, and this connects to a bigger misconception. A battery can show nominal voltage with no load — say, nine point one volts — and still be useless. The moment you put it in a circuit that draws current, the voltage collapses. That's why a multimeter alone can't tell you if a battery is good — you need a load tester, or at minimum you need to measure the voltage while the device is trying to run.
Before we go further — the symbols on the dial. Because that's the thing that makes people put the meter back in the drawer. You've got V with a straight line, V with a wavy line, the omega symbol, the little speaker icon, the diode arrow.
Let's decode it. DC voltage is V with a straight line and a dashed line — sometimes just a straight line. AC voltage is V with a wavy line, like a tilde. Resistance is the Greek letter omega, looks like a horseshoe. Continuity is usually a little speaker or sound-wave icon, often paired with the diode test mode, which is a little arrow pointing at a line — the schematic symbol for a diode. Then you've got current, which is A for amps — usually with separate jacks on the meter for milliamps and for high current, typically up to ten amps.
The separate jacks are the thing that gets people in trouble. But we'll get there.
So let's talk about continuity testing, because this is the mode I use more than any other. It's the buzzer test. You touch the two probes together, the meter beeps, and you know there's a complete electrical path. This is how you check if a fuse is blown, if a wire is broken inside the insulation, if a trace on a circuit board has cracked. It solves probably forty percent of repair problems before you even need to think about voltage.
Walk me through a real diagnosis with continuity.
Say you've got a dead laptop charger. The laptop won't power on, no lights, nothing. First thing: unplug the charger from the wall — never do continuity checks on anything that's plugged in, ever — and set the meter to continuity mode. Touch one probe to the inside of the barrel connector, the other probe to the outside. If the meter beeps, you've got a short between positive and negative — that charger is toast. If it doesn't beep, good, now check the cable itself. Put one probe on the barrel connector tip and the other on the corresponding pin at the plug end. You've just diagnosed a bad cable in thirty seconds without plugging anything in.
That's the thing — continuity is the mode that answers the question "is electricity supposed to flow here, and is it actually flowing?" It's binary. Beep or no beep. It doesn't require understanding voltage or current or Ohm's law. It's the entry point.
It catches things that visual inspection misses. I've had fuses that looked perfectly fine — the little wire inside was intact — but they'd failed at the end cap where you can't see. Continuity mode caught it instantly. Fuses can look fine and be completely open.
Of course they can. Like a car that looks great on the outside but has no engine.
Now, moving to resistance measurement — this is where people start to get nervous because there are numbers involved and they're not sure what the numbers mean. Resistance is measured in ohms, and it tells you how much a component resists the flow of current. A resistor with color bands that say ten thousand ohms — ten kilo-ohms — should read close to ten thousand ohms on the meter. If it reads twelve thousand, it's drifted out of spec and should be replaced. If it reads zero, it's shorted. If it reads infinite — usually the meter shows "OL" for overload — it's open.
You never measure resistance on a live circuit.
This is one of those rules that's absolute. If there's voltage present, the resistance reading will be wrong at best, and at worst you can damage the meter. The meter measures resistance by sending a small known current through the component and measuring the voltage drop. If there's already voltage on the circuit, the meter's internal current gets swamped and the reading is meaningless. Always discharge capacitors, remove power, and ideally remove one leg of the component from the circuit if you want a truly accurate reading.
"Remove one leg" — this is the part where the hobbyist who just wants to fix their thing starts to wonder if they're in over their head.
Honestly, for most hobbyist work, you don't need to remove components. If you're checking whether a resistor has gone completely open or shorted, you can do that in-circuit and the reading will be close enough. The precision stuff matters more when you're dealing with circuits where a ten percent drift actually changes behavior — analog audio gear, precision timing circuits, that kind of thing. For diagnosing a dead toaster, in-circuit is fine.
We've covered voltage, continuity, and resistance — the big three. But there's a fourth mode that's both incredibly useful and the easiest way to blow up your meter: current measurement.
This is where I need to be really clear, because current measurement is the mode that separates people who've read the manual from people who learn by popping fuses. To measure current, you have to break the circuit and insert the meter in series. The current has to flow through the meter. This is fundamentally different from voltage, where you probe across two points. If you set your meter to current mode and touch the probes across a battery — which is what your instinct tells you to do, because that's how you measure voltage — you've just created a dead short. The meter's internal resistance in current mode is nearly zero. Best case, you blow the internal fuse. Worst case, with a cheap meter that skimps on fuse protection, you melt the probes or worse.
The practical takeaway: current mode requires intention. You have to think about what you're doing before you do it.
And here's the workflow. Say you want to measure how much current an LED circuit is drawing. You'd set the meter to the milliamp range, move the red probe to the milliamp jack, and then physically disconnect one wire in the circuit. One probe goes to the wire you disconnected, the other probe goes to the terminal the wire was connected to. The meter is now part of the circuit. When you're done, you move the red probe back to the voltage jack immediately. That last step is critical.
Because leaving the probe in the current jack and then trying to measure voltage is the classic mistake.
It's the number one way meters get destroyed. The probe is in the ten-amp jack, which is basically a direct short through a shunt resistor. You touch it across a voltage source, and you've just created a path for massive current to flow. On a good meter, the internal fuse blows and you replace a fifteen-dollar ceramic fuse. On a cheap meter, the fuse might not be there at all, or it might be a glass fuse that arcs over and doesn't actually protect anything. I've seen photos of meters where the probes welded themselves to the test points.
That's a good segue into the money question. What are you actually getting when you spend more on a meter? Because the twenty-dollar AstroAI or whatever is on Amazon looks awfully similar to the hundred-and-fifty-dollar Fluke.
They look similar because they're copying the Fluke design language, but the internals tell a completely different story. First: input impedance. The Fluke seventeen B plus has an input impedance of ten megaohms on its voltage ranges. Many twenty-dollar meters have one megaohm. Why does this matter? Because when you're measuring voltage on a high-impedance circuit, like a logic gate or a microcontroller pin, the meter itself becomes part of the circuit. A one-megaohm meter will load the circuit down, pulling current and changing the voltage you're trying to measure. A ten-megaohm meter is much closer to invisible.
The cheap meter lies to you, but only in specific situations where the circuit is sensitive.
Second big difference: True RMS versus average responding. An average-responding meter measures AC voltage by taking the average value of the waveform and multiplying by a correction factor that assumes it's a pure sine wave. If you're measuring mains power, that's fine — the grid is a pretty good sine wave. But if you're measuring the output of a PWM fan controller, a switching power supply, or a variable frequency drive, that waveform is not a sine wave. An average-responding meter will give you a wrong reading — sometimes wildly wrong.
Give me a concrete example.
You're measuring a twelve-volt PWM fan signal. The pulses are twelve volts peak, but the duty cycle is fifty percent. An average-responding meter might read six volts. A True RMS meter will read twelve volts, because it's actually calculating the root mean square of the waveform — the effective heating value, which is what matters. If you're troubleshooting a motor controller and you trust the average-responding meter, you'll think you've got a six-volt signal and spend hours trying to figure out why the twelve-volt motor isn't spinning properly.
True RMS matters for anything that isn't a pure sine wave, which is increasingly everything.
And the third big difference is safety ratings. Meters are rated by CAT categories — CAT one, two, three, and four. CAT one is for protected electronic circuits, like a phone charger's low-voltage side. CAT two is for plug-in appliances — your wall outlet, but downstream of the breaker panel. CAT three is for distribution wiring — the breaker panel itself, three-phase circuits, lighting systems in large buildings. CAT four is for the utility connection — the wiring before the main breaker, outdoor feeders.
Most people are going to be probing wall outlets at some point.
Which requires a minimum of CAT three. A CAT two meter is not rated for the available fault current at a breaker panel. If you accidentally create a short while probing inside a panel with a CAT two meter, the meter could literally explode in your hand. Fluke meters have proper blast protection — the case is designed to contain an arc flash, the fuses are ceramic high-rupturing-capacity types rated for a thousand volts, and the probes have finger guards rated for the same CAT level as the meter. Cheap meters sometimes print "CAT three" on the front without actually meeting the standard. There's no enforcement, and if you're buying a twenty-dollar meter from a no-name brand, you're trusting your hands to whatever they felt like doing that day.
The twenty-dollar meter is fine for low-voltage hobbyist work — Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, checking batteries, testing continuity on cables.
It's fine for ninety percent of what hobbyists actually do. If you're only ever going to probe five-volt and twelve-volt DC circuits, a twenty-dollar meter will serve you well. The main upgrade path isn't about features — it's about safety and accuracy in situations that most hobbyists never encounter. But the moment you decide to open up a wall outlet or poke around inside an appliance that plugs into mains, you need a meter you can trust with your life.
What about the other features that come with more expensive meters? Capacitance, frequency, temperature?
Capacitance measurement is genuinely useful. When you're diagnosing a dead piece of electronics, one of the most common failure modes is electrolytic capacitors that have dried out or shorted. You'll see a bulging top on the capacitor — that's the vent, designed to rupture safely instead of exploding — and you can use the capacitance mode to confirm it's gone bad. A capacitor rated for a thousand microfarads that reads three hundred microfarads is done. Frequency and duty cycle measurement is useful if you're working with PWM signals, motor controllers, or switching regulators. You can verify that a microcontroller is actually outputting the PWM frequency you expect. It's a niche feature for most people, but when you need it, you really need it. Temperature measurement, via a thermocouple probe, is handy for checking whether a heatsink is actually doing its job or whether a component is running hot enough to fail. Again — niche, but the sort of thing that a fifty-to-hundred-dollar meter often includes.
Let's talk about autoranging, because that's another feature that separates the cheap from the not-cheap.
Autoranging is one of those things that, once you've used it, you don't want to go back. On a manual-ranging meter, you have to know roughly what voltage you expect and set the dial accordingly. If you're measuring a nine-volt battery, you set it to the twenty-volt range. If you accidentally set it to the two-volt range, the meter shows overload and you have to dial up. Autoranging just figures it out — you set it to volts, it shows you the reading. When you're probing twenty test points on a board, not having to fiddle with the range dial every time saves real time.
The other creature comfort: backlight.
I will die on the hill that a backlit screen is not a luxury. When you're hunched over a circuit board in a dim corner of a server rack or under a desk, trying to read a non-backlit LCD at an angle, you will curse whoever decided to save fifty cents on the bill of materials. Good meters have bright, even backlights. Great meters have auto-off backlights that don't drain the battery when you forget to turn the meter off — which, by the way, is another thing cheap meters often lack: auto power-off.
What about data logging and Bluetooth? That's showing up in mid-range meters now.
It's useful for certain kinds of diagnosis. If you're trying to catch an intermittent fault — a voltage that dips for half a second once every few minutes — you can't just stare at the meter waiting for it. You connect it via Bluetooth to your phone, set it to log, and walk away. Come back an hour later and you can see exactly when the drop happened and how deep it was. It's not essential for most people, but if you're diagnosing something that fails randomly, it's a game changer.
Let's build a hierarchy. Twenty dollars gets you basic DC voltage, AC voltage, resistance, continuity, and maybe diode test. Fifty to a hundred dollars adds autoranging, backlight, capacitance, better input impedance, maybe True RMS. A hundred and fifty and up gets you proper CAT ratings, ceramic fuses, ten-megaohm impedance, fast autoranging, data logging, and a brand name that's actually tested to the standards printed on the front.
That's a fair summary. And I want to emphasize something about the diode test mode, because it's one of the most underappreciated functions on a multimeter. Diode test doesn't just tell you if a diode is good or bad — it tells you the forward voltage drop. A silicon diode should show about zero point five to zero point seven volts in the forward direction and overload in the reverse direction. A Schottky diode will show a lower forward voltage, around zero point two to zero point four volts. If it shows zero point zero volts in both directions, it's shorted. If it shows overload in both directions, it's open.
This is useful beyond just checking individual diodes.
Very much so. You can use diode test to check transistors — a bipolar junction transistor is essentially two diodes back to back. You can check the body diode of a MOSFET. You can check whether an LED is functional — the diode test will actually light up most LEDs dimly. And for one of my favorite tricks: you can use diode test to check if a microcontroller pin's protection diodes are intact. If you've got a Raspberry Pi that won't boot and you suspect a GPIO pin got zapped, put the red probe on ground and the black probe on the suspect GPIO pin. A healthy pin will show the forward voltage of the internal ESD protection diode, around zero point five volts. A dead pin will show a short or an open.
That's the kind of thing that separates "I own a multimeter" from "I know how to use a multimeter.
It's not hard. It's just knowledge that most tutorials never get to because they're too busy explaining what voltage is. That's the problem with most multimeter guides — they start with the physics when people just want to know which setting makes the thing beep and what the beep means.
Let's walk through a full diagnostic workflow. Something's dead on the bench. What's the sequence?
Step one: visual inspection. Look for burned components, bulging capacitors, cracked solder joints, loose connectors. You'd be amazed how many problems you can spot without even turning the meter on. Step two: continuity. Is power getting from where it enters the device to where it's supposed to go? Check the power cord, the fuse, the power switch, any connectors along the path. Step three: voltage. With the device plugged in and turned on, check that the power supply is outputting the correct voltage. Check the voltage rails on the board — the three point three volt line, the five volt line, the twelve volt line. If any of those are missing or low, you've narrowed the problem to the power supply section. Step four: resistance and diode test. With power removed, check individual components in the suspect area — resistors, diodes, transistors, capacitors.
That's a decision tree that actually works.
It works because it's systematic. You're not randomly probing things hoping to find a problem. You're following the power from the wall to the circuit, and the moment you find where it stops, you've found your fault. It's the electrical equivalent of "follow the money.
What about measuring wall outlets? Because that's the thing everyone wants to try first, and it's also the thing that can kill you.
Measuring mains voltage is safe if you do it correctly and terrifying if you don't. Set the meter to AC volts, autoranging or the six-hundred-volt range. Make sure the probes are in the voltage and common jacks — not the current jacks. Hold the probes by the insulated handles, behind the finger guards. Insert the probes into the outlet slots — doesn't matter which probe goes where for AC. You should read somewhere between a hundred and ten and a hundred and twenty volts in North America, or two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty volts in most of the rest of the world. Never touch the metal tips. Never let the probes touch each other while they're in the outlet. And if you're not comfortable doing this, don't do it. There's no shame in calling an electrician.
The finger guards exist for a reason and they're not a suggestion.
They really aren't. And this is where the CAT rating conversation comes full circle. If you're going to probe mains voltage, use a CAT three rated meter with proper probe leads. The probes that come with cheap meters often have minimal finger guards and insulation that isn't rated for the voltage they claim. Good probes cost almost as much as a cheap meter, and they're worth every penny.
We've talked about what the modes do, how to diagnose, and what you get for more money. Let's talk about the elephant in the room: the manual that comes with the cheap meter.
It's universally terrible. I've read dozens of them and they all share the same problems. They list the specifications — accuracy within zero point five percent plus or minus two digits — without explaining what that means. They show the symbols on the dial without telling you when you'd use each one. They include a diagram of the meter with numbered callouts, but the numbers don't correspond to anything in the text. It's documentation written by someone who already knows how to use a multimeter, for someone who they assume also already knows.
The curse of knowledge.
And that's why episodes like this exist — because the documentation is so bad that the only way to learn is from someone who can bridge the gap. Once you understand the basic modes and the diagnostic workflow, the manual's specs actually become useful. You can look at the accuracy spec and know whether this meter is good enough for what you're trying to measure. But you have to get over the initial hump first.
What's the weirdest thing you've ever diagnosed with a multimeter?
I once tracked down an intermittent fault in a vintage audio amplifier that turned out to be a solder joint that looked perfect but had a hairline crack invisible to the naked eye. In circuit, it measured fine most of the time, but when the board warmed up and expanded, the joint would separate by a few microns and the resistance would spike. I only caught it because I had the meter in continuity mode and I was gently flexing the board — the beep cut out for a split second. That's the kind of thing that makes you feel like a wizard.
Flexing the board while probing is a pro move. You're introducing mechanical stress to find intermittent connections.
It's one of those techniques that isn't in any manual but every experienced technician knows. Heat and mechanical stress are the enemy of electronics, and they're also your diagnostic tools. If a device fails after it's been running for a while, heat is probably the culprit. If it fails when you move it or bump it, it's mechanical. The multimeter lets you see what's happening electrically when you apply those stresses.
Let's circle back to something you mentioned earlier — the internal fuse. You said blowing it doesn't kill the meter, just the current measurement function.
On most meters, the current measurement path goes through a dedicated fuse. If you blow that fuse by trying to measure current across a voltage source — which, again, is the classic mistake — the voltage, resistance, continuity, and diode test functions still work perfectly. The meter isn't bricked. You just can't measure current until you replace the fuse. On a Fluke, that fuse is a ceramic high-rupturing-capacity type rated for ten amps at a thousand volts, and it costs about fifteen dollars to replace. On a cheap meter, the fuse might be soldered to the board, or it might be a glass fuse that's not rated for the energy it might see. I've opened cheap meters that had no fuse at all on the ten-amp range — just a thick trace on the circuit board acting as a shunt.
A circuit board trace as a fuse is the electrical equivalent of "this is fine" while everything's on fire.
It's horrifying. If that trace vaporizes during a fault, it can create an arc inside the meter. Without proper blast containment, that arc can find its way to the user. This is not a theoretical concern — there are documented cases of cheap meters exploding during high-energy faults. The CAT rating isn't just a sticker; it's a set of design requirements about creepage distances, fuse types, input protection, and case integrity.
For the listener who's got a twenty-dollar meter and wants to know if it's dangerous: for low-voltage DC work, it's almost certainly fine. For mains voltage, the answer is "maybe, and do you want to bet your hands on maybe?
And I'll add: even for low-voltage work, be aware of energy sources. A lead-acid battery — like a car battery — can deliver hundreds of amps into a short circuit. That's enough to vaporize probe tips and cause serious burns, even at twelve volts. Voltage isn't the only thing that makes electricity dangerous. Current and available energy matter too.
What about the probes themselves? They seem like an afterthought but you mentioned they matter.
Probes are the interface between you and the circuit, and they're often the weakest link. Good probes have silicone-insulated leads that stay flexible and don't melt when you accidentally touch them to a hot component. Cheap probes use PVC insulation that gets stiff over time and melts at soldering temperatures. Good probes have sharp, gold-plated tips that make reliable contact. Cheap probes have dull nickel-plated tips that develop an oxide layer and give intermittent readings. And the finger guards on good probes are substantial and properly positioned. On cheap probes, they're often just a thin ring of plastic that your fingers can slip past.
Silicon versus PVC is one of those things you don't appreciate until you've used both.
It's night and day. Silicone leads drape nicely, they don't kink, and they don't develop a memory from being coiled up. PVC leads turn into a tangled mess that holds its shape like a bad perm. It sounds trivial, but when you're probing a dense circuit board and your probe leads keep springing back into a coil shape, it adds friction to every single measurement.
Let's talk about the three things a listener should test today, right now, with whatever meter they have.
First: test a battery. Set the meter to DC volts, touch the probes to the terminals, and see what you get. A fresh AA alkaline should be around one point six volts. A nine-volt below seven point five is dead. A twelve-volt car battery at rest should be around twelve point six volts — if it's below twelve point two, it needs charging. Second: test a wall outlet. Set the meter to AC volts, be careful, and see what your mains voltage actually is. In North America, expect a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty. Third: test a fuse. Pull a fuse out of something — a Christmas light plug, an old appliance, whatever — set the meter to continuity, and touch the probes to both ends. If it beeps, the fuse is good. If it doesn't, you just found a bad fuse.
Three measurements, five minutes, and you've actually used the thing instead of staring at it.
That's the barrier to entry. Once you've done those three measurements, the meter stops being a mysterious brick with symbols and becomes a tool you understand. From there, it's just practice and pattern recognition. Every new circuit you probe teaches you something about what normal looks like, and once you know what normal looks like, abnormal jumps out at you.
One last pro tip for the audience — you mentioned it in passing but it deserves its own moment.
Always remove the probes from the current jacks when you're done measuring current. Before you do anything else. The most common way to destroy a meter — and potentially hurt yourself — is leaving the probes in the ten-amp jack and then switching to voltage mode to probe a power supply. Make it a ritual. Measure current, move the probe back to the voltage jack, then turn off the meter.
Rituals are how you stay safe when your brain is on autopilot.
And that's true of a lot of electronics work. Develop the habits when you're thinking about them, so they're automatic when you're not.
What's the open question we leave people with? What's the thing that, once they've mastered the basics, they should go try?
I want to know what weird thing people have diagnosed with a multimeter. The intermittent fault they caught by flexing a board, the counterfeit component they identified because the readings didn't match the datasheet, the "this can't possibly be the problem" moment that turned out to be exactly the problem. Send those stories in, because we might do a follow-up episode. The best multimeter tips don't come from manuals — they come from people who've been elbow-deep in a repair and discovered something the engineers never anticipated.
As more devices move to USB-C PD and higher voltages — we're seeing twenty-volt charging become standard, and forty-eight-volt systems showing up in home energy storage — understanding multimeter safety and proper probing technique isn't just a hobby skill anymore. It's becoming household knowledge.
The voltages in our homes are going up, not down. Twenty years ago, the highest DC voltage most people encountered was twelve volts in their car. Now we've got USB-C PD at twenty volts, Power over Ethernet at forty-eight volts, solar panel strings at hundreds of volts DC. The skills we've talked about today scale — the principles are the same whether you're probing a five-volt Arduino or a four-hundred-volt solar array. What changes is the consequence of getting it wrong.
That's a good place to land. If this episode helped you finally take the multimeter out of the drawer and actually use it, leave us a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show, and it keeps us making episodes like this one.
If you want more on the electronics repair workflow, we did a whole episode on soldering — the other skill that pairs perfectly with what we covered today. That's episode one forty-seven, The Art of the Solder Joint. Check it out if you're building your bench skills.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The Venus flytrap's scientific name, Dionaea muscipula, was given in the seventeen hundreds by botanist John Ellis. "Dionaea" means "daughter of Dione" — a reference to Venus, the goddess of love. But "muscipula" is Latin for "mousetrap." So the full name literally translates to "Venus's mousetrap." Ellis wrote to Carl Linnaeus that he almost named it "Tipulivora" — "crane-fly eater" — but thought "mousetrap" was more memorable.
Hilbert: The Venus flytrap's scientific name, Dionaea muscipula, was given in the seventeen hundreds by botanist John Ellis. "Dionaea" means "daughter of Dione" — a reference to Venus, the goddess of love. But "muscipula" is Latin for "mousetrap." So the full name literally translates to "Venus's mousetrap." Ellis wrote to Carl Linnaeus that he almost named it "Tipulivora" — "crane-fly eater" — but thought "mousetrap" was more memorable.
Venus's mousetrap. A carnivorous plant named after a goddess and a pest-control device.
Botanists in the seventeen hundreds were not subtle. Thank you, Hilbert.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We're your hosts, Corn and Herman Poppleberry. Produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. Find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com. We'll be back with a new one soon.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.