Need a good multimeter? The Fluke 17B is an excellent basic meter that will last your entire career. It’s also $100 USD. Need something cheaper? Allow me to introduce the AIMOmeter MS8217. On the outside, it’s a direct copy of the Fluke 17b, right down to the screen printing but understandably lacking the yellow enclosure. $30 USD will get you an exact copy of a Fluke 17B, it would seem. Right? Not a chance. [electronupdate] did a teardown of the AIMOmeter, and while this meter looks like a Fluke on the outside, it’s probably going to kill somebody.

The teardown begins with a look at the ratings on the back of this off-brand meter. It does have two fuses, but the engraving on the back strangely claims ‘Wrrebt insurance limit’. If anyone has any idea what a ‘wrrebt’ is, please leave a note in the comments. The only references to this word in Google are mis-OCRed blackletter type in a book from the early 1800s.

Opening up the meter reveals – surprisingly – two real fuses in the meter. There were no markings on the bigger fuse, which could be a problem for verifying if the fuse is of the proper value. That’s not really a problem, though: the fuse isn’t even between ground and the amp probe socket. Yes, this fuse is completely useless, and testing the resistance with the fuse out of the circuit confirms this.

After putting the meter back together, [electron] tests the accuracy of the meter. With a 1 mA current source, the mA setting seems to work, but when testing the larger Amp range of this meter, the results display in milliVolts. Don’t worry, there’s an easy fix for that: just press the dial down just right and the correct setting will be displayed. Wow.

You get what you pay for, and if you only ever use an AIMOmeter for measuring Arduinos and batteries, you might – might – be alright. This is not the kind of meter you want to measure line voltage, motors, or anything else with, though.