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Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

badar.tech

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Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#161

Post by crote »

jimnotgym wrote: post #60
danaos wrote: post #48

> Rigol DS1054Z Digital Oscilloscope Interesting as I'm considering buying a scope. Does this still give the most bang for your buck in 2023? Many online commenters mention the Siglent SDS1104X-E as a more modern alternative.

Or you can buy an old crt one for £10 and see if you have use for a scope before you commit. They do take up more room though!

Except that those old cheap ones are almost universally analog scopes. They are pretty much completely useless for digital work. In the current Arduino-filled world, you are probably going to need a DSO.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#162

Post by crote »

johnwalkr wrote: post #14

Hakko FX-888D is great and appropriate with the other stuff mentioned (although I prefer the older version with an analogue knob for temperature control), but it's $115 and for most new hobbyists a $25 pinecil or a $25 knockoff Hakko T12 is perfectly adequate and miles ahead of anything you'd find in a home depot for the same price.

The TS100 and TS80 are also good cheap alternatives!

One drawback of the Pinecil is that it is solely the iron. You still need to add a power supply, heat-resistant cable, a stand, and a sponge. Not a huge deal, but it is a bit more than $25 to actually start soldering.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#163

Post by CarVac »

crote wrote: post #156
CarVac wrote: post #145

I urge people to ditch leaded solder in favor of lead-free. Most difficulties people have in using lead-free comes from one of three things: 1. a poor soldering iron 2. bad quality solder (the cheap stuff with bad flux is bad, duh) 3. poor technique (among other things, wipe your tip just before using, not before putting it away) I like the Chipquik SAC305 with no-clean flux and other people I've recommended it to fi…

The biggest difference is that an improperly soldered leaded joint looks very obviously wrong, whereas a good lead-free joint can be pretty much indistinguishable from a bad one. If you are just starting out - and will therefore by definition have a poor iron, cheap solder, and poor technique - leaded is definitely the way to go. Once your first spool of leaded runs out, it is probably time to switch to lead-free.

The "shiny" aspect is the only way an improperly soldered joint can look the same on lead-free, and as a lead dev on an open-source hardware project that attracts a lot of people new to soldering, I have never ever seen a non-shiny leaded solder joint that wasn't horrendously bad in many other ways.

When a joint is bad, you get obviously poor wetting and weird mushroom shapes, but even so a newbie will not really notice that even using leaded solder.

If you are starting out, and you have a poor iron, cheap solder, and poor technique, you have already made two grave mistakes. We always urge people starting out to shell out in the $50 range for something that won't actively make them suffer, and they do just fine with SAC305.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#164

Post by crote »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #40

I have one of the more basic UNI-T multimeters and can highly recommend it. It's always there when I need it (the single 9V battery keeps it going for years) and has great precision. One thing that I don't have - and really want to have - is a variable power supply with constant voltage/current. They can be used when you have an unusual battery you need to charge safely, for instance. Unfortunately, they always seem…

The reason lab PSUs are so expensive is that they are incredibly stable. A regular cheap power supply will provide a sort-of stable voltage, but there will be a loooot of noise on it. Meanwhile, even a basic lab PSU will guarantee the output voltage to within a few mV, no matter what you throw at it. This allows you to completely rule out the PSU as a potential source of faults.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#165

Post by riceart »

ftxbro wrote: post #157
riceart wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, much much less. That o-scope is $349 and that's the most expensive item (well outside of the computer workstation), and everything is cheapish (which as pointed out elsewhere is only going to be used for a restricted set of hobbyist work). It is somewhat telling that there is more money paid on the computer - this is more a computer enthusiast who dabbles in electronics setup (not that there is anything wrong wit…

i dunno man, stuff adds up. He says he has "more than a thousand different electric components for PCBs" and that's just some random stuff not the big ones. How much do you think his more than a thousand different electric components for PCBs would cost, just by itself? Do you think he buys each one in bags of 1? That's not including any of the other random things.

1000 different components is really not that many - especially if you're counting individual resistors and diodes (as the pictures would suggest). These passives are literally pennies or fractions thereof in bulk. You can buy large kits of 100s of resistor values for less than $20.

> How much do you think his more than a thousand different electric components for PCBs would cost, just by itself?

Easily less than $500 based on the items there's a glimpse of - probably much less.

> Do you think he buys each one in bags of 1?

I doubt it - that would be utterly stupid for passives and this guy doesn't seem stupid - if anything obviously frugal to a fault. I think there are too many corners cut - there is some bench equipment that is worth splurging a bit on. But even when you buy small quantities of SMT components they are usually cut off a tape - and in the US sold for a huge ass markup. It seems his bagging and inventory system is homegrown.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#167

Post by contingencies »

InvisibleUp wrote: post #132
contingencies wrote: post #128

I would caution against taking the power supply recommendation for two reasons. (1) Don't buy equipment without LXI as IMHO once you get going you really need coherent and scriptable ethernet control of everything. Yes, you can work manually or use some oddball vendor tool over USB. Yes, it's slow, error prone, and frustrating. The difference between getting things done and getting burned out is largely down to choic…

Regarding point 1, USB-TMC is just as good as LXI, really. Completely industry standard, just like LXI or GPIB. LXI is great if you need it , but you probably don't if everything's on the same desk. And there's even more instruments that just create a virtual COM port over USB and allow SCPI commands over that, and that's perfectly fine. You just have to configure it via something like [Keysight's Connection Expert p…

Yeah, no. USB is terrible at resisting electrical interference and has a world of poor cables with a connector half-life of about 10 years. TCP/IP over STP is cheap, ubiquitous and not going away.

Routable instrument control > non-routable instrument control. See https://github.com/lxi-tools/lxi-tools/wiki#background-infor...

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#168

Post by atonse »

penguin_booze wrote: post #104
jakewins wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have (had? getting better!) this same issue, and it really killed excitement of electronics for me for a long time. I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848 I do think there…

Are there any YT series that are worthy of mention? I think I've a PDF copy of The Art of Electronics. One day...

Louis Rossman’s series on learning electronics is what truly clicked for me.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#169

Post by cascades42 »

jakewins wrote: post #98
penguin_booze wrote: post #87

I used be an ameteur electronics enthusiast. When I was young, I used to assemble trivial circuits (dancing lights etc.): I could go to an electronics shop. They used to sell hobby kits for simple, accessible, devices. The kit had circuit layout, component list, labels, what goes where and all. I then assembled them per the layout ("this leg of the transistor goes to the left leg of the capacitor"). It worked - I use…

I have (had? getting better!) this same issue, and it really killed excitement of electronics for me for a long time. I asked @theacodes on here this same question, on a post they'd written that like.. actually got into "ok, I'm putting this capacitor here, because it's gonna do for me, another way I could do the same thing is..", and their reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33484848 I do think there…

I agree that "The Art of Electronics" is a great reference.

"Practical Electronics for Inventors" is another good one that I found much more approachable and also more inspiring.

Re: Electronics Lab Bench Setup Guide

#170

Post by mindcrime »

szundi wrote: post #148
penguin_booze wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any YT series that are worthy of mention? I think I've a PDF copy of The Art of Electronics. One day...

Eevblog

EEVBlog is great, but... anybody just discovering the channel should be aware, Dave puts out content that fits into a number of different categories: educational, entertainment, edutainment, test equipment reviews / teardowns, mailbag, repairs, debunking, meta commentary about Youtube, career stuff, and "other". And purely educational stuff isn't a huge part of what he puts out these days. That said, he has put out some really good stuff, especially back when he was doing "Fundamentals Friday" as a routine thing. Just don't expect a steady stream of purely educational, "electronics fundamentals" stuff.
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