Equipment for Electronics Lab

Hello. Here is a short list of the content of a basic hobby lab... I'll try not to forget too much!

- Precision and standard screwdrivers sets (~15$)

- Precision pliers of all kinds (~10$)

- A good wire cutter (the kind used to cut excess leads under pcbs) (~5$)

- A set of tweezers (~20$)

- A lab power supply (~100$)

- If your budget allows it, an oscilloscope is always useful (~350$+)

- A multimeter (~50$)

- A breadboard or two with jumper wires (~30$)

- A soldering iron and soldering wire (~40$)

- A de-soldering pump (aka a sucker) (~5$)

- Aligator clips are always good (~5$)

- Lots, Lots, Lots, Lots and Lots of assorted parts of all kinds. ICs, Transistors, Resistors, Capacitors, Pots, everything you can get. (~1500$+)

- Prototyping PCBs or blank PCBs with everything needed to etch them might be useful if you intend to keep your projects in one piece. There are several techniques so the hardware will vary.

If you're going to work with programmable ICs, SMD/SMT and the such, I suggest to consider the following too:

- A SMD rework station (hot air gun) (~100$)

- A pick and place vacuum pen

- A set of wax carver tools (these are useful to manipulate parts, straighten small IC pins, etc.) (~15$)

- A microscope (~100$ to 300$)

- A programmer (the Willem kind is fine as it covers most of the basic programmable ICs out there) (~35$)

- A computer dedicated to your hobby room (running with the project board all over the house isnt a good idea) (~I bet you have an extra one!)

- A signal/function generator is not a must but might save your day, one day. (~200$)

For added paranoia, or if you're going to work with expensive or sensitive microcontrollers, get an anti-electrostatic mat for your desktop and/or an electrostatic protection wirst strap.

The rest is up to your needs depending on your specific projects and the type of work you're gonna do.

All of that hardware can be found on eBay. The prices I gave are based on what I remember (or think I remember) I paid.

"What you need" depends a huge amount on what you plan to do. Radio, microprocessors, audio, ...

One approach is to buy stuff as your hobby project of the moment requires - that will tend to match up your equipment to what you are actually doing, or have done, rather than tying up bunches of money in things you never use for your particular projects. If you are somewhat vague about projects, start in with things you need - you can build power supplies, buy kits to build meters, etc.

Oscilloscope (but there's a huge range, depending on what you plan to do.) Big differences are Analog .vs. Digital, number of channels, and speed.

Function generator

Frequency counter (perhaps, depending...)

Spectrum analyzer (perhaps, depending, but even old ones will probably blow your budget, so perhaps not)

Soldering tools - a combined iron/hot air system is one approach.

Anti-static (not essential for some things, but cheap enough to just do right once - get a good rubber bench mat and wrist-band)

meter(s) - multimeter, perhaps more than one or some dedicated less capable meters (advantage being that you can look at two parameters at once if you have more than one meter). Simpler meters have the advantage of being dirt cheap. One that does L/C (inductance/capacitance) is invaluable, especially if getting used parts by scrapping old equipment, as the markings are often obscure - or if winding your own inductors.

Power supplies

Parts to play with - resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, op-amps, ...

cables, wires, breadboards etc.

Most digital scopes nowadays, even the sub-$1000 ones, will measure frequency and do basic spectral analysis. A decent color digital scope is worth it.

John

I can't second this advise more. You need to buy what you're going to want, and beyond the very basics you can't know that until you've been doing it for a while. I suggest you start by spending $200 to $500 now, and stash the remainder under a cabinet or in a special bank account (at least in the US banks are quite happy to let you open a second account, which makes it easy to separate your money).

That much money will get you a ton of basic equipment, or about 1/20th of a top-of-the-line oscilloscope. So you _do_ want to figure out what you want to spend your money on before it's all gone.

I also suggest that before you buy anything beyond pliers, multimeter, wire cutters and soldering iron, that you sit down and answer the question "is there a way that I can do this job with the equipment that I have". There are many pieces of specialized equipment that will do a job fast, and are essential for a profitable business, that you can replace with basic equipment and time spent in careful work in a hobbyist shop.

That is a huge budget for a hobbyist setup!

If you can seriously afford that sort of cash, then spend $1000 to maybe $1500 on a decent digital oscilloscope, this will be by far your best investment. For that price you can get one with decent memory, bandwidth, and a digital logic analyser as well.

Then all the other basics like function generator (say a 20MHz one), multimeter (nice accurate autoranging Fluke or Meterman), lab power supplies (plural, you need more than one), and a decent SMD soldering system. Plus all the usual cables and hand tools etc.

As other have said, you need to know what sort of stuff you will be working on before you can know what to get in the more exotic line of test gear.

Save a good chunk of that cash for specific development boards, parts etc for specific projects you are interesting in.

Dave.

SHAMELESS PLUG: If you are going to be working at audio frequencies, you might want to consider my Daqarta sound-card software. It does all of the above (and a whole lot more) for US$29 (personal/hobby license). You can try it for free, and even if you decide not to buy, the function generator features keep on working after the trial period. You are welcome to use Daqarta forever like this.

The function generator does *way* more than any benchtop unit. You get 2 independent output channels, with up to 4 separate "streams" per channel. Each stream can have its own waveform (all the standards plus Arb and file Play and different kinds of noise, including Band-limited) and can be modulated: Burst, AM, FM, Phase or PWM, and Sweep. You can add the streams to get a combined output, or use a stream as the modulation source for another stream.

The Frequency Counter has a much better resolution/response tradeoff then most benchtop units because it actually measures the period and takes the reciprocal. So you can read 440.001 Hz without waiting 1000 seconds. It also can show msec, or event Total.

Spectrum mode offers a range of windowing functions, log or linear X and/or Y axes, automatic peak tracking (for cursor readouts) and the ability to apply weighting or calibration curves. (You can, for example, read SPL directly with a calibrated microphone.)

Besides Spectrum, you can view a 256-color Spectrogram to see time, energy, and frequency on the same plot.

The standard waveform (scope) mode offers several trigger modes, including internal sync to the signal generator. You can use positive or negative trigger delay (negative allows you to see what happened

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v3.50 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

John knows this, but for others: The dynamic range of a scope is usually little better than ~50dB. If you find yourself liking what you're seeing on a scope's spectral display, but want to dig out weaker signals, any old purpose-built spectrum analyzer (read: something cheap you can buy used) will generally give at least 90dB dynamic range -- much more useful for, e.g., low level RF work or sniffing around boards for EMC checks.

Yeah, the fft's are mediocre. I found one of my guys complaining about some huge odd harmonic distortion on a sine wave. Turns out he'd cranked up the volts/div knob to better resolve the distortion, and overloaded the front end, turning the signal into a square wave.

John

Jheez! He must be a young guy.

Why can't they be like we were? Perfect, in every way. What's the matter with kids today?

Bob

Yes, but very smart. He won't do that again.

Partly the problem that there's about 50x more stuff to learn.

John

I guess I forgot to mention this, didn't I?

I intend to work mostly with micro controllers, such as the AVR and the Propeller chip, and with various peripherals such as motion sensors, pressure sensors, and motor controllers.

Does this knowledge change the list?