Electronics > Beginners
Need Advice Please. Lab Setup
Prehistoricman:
Being resourceful is great and all, but having the right equipment when you need it is truly great.
When I feel able to, I'm going to upgrade from an analog scope to a digital one, probably 4-channel. Not because I need it, but because I'm tried of taking pictures of the scope to use as trace storage |O
As someone who's had a variable power supply from the beginning, using wall warts would piss me off! I knew a guy who didn't get a bench PSU for years and just used batteries :palm: but he did well with what he had.
Simon_RL:
--- Quote from: Prehistoricman on January 16, 2020, 03:12:48 am ---Being resourceful is great and all, but having the right equipment when you need it is truly great.
When I feel able to, I'm going to upgrade from an analog scope to a digital one, probably 4-channel. Not because I need it, but because I'm tried of taking pictures of the scope to use as trace storage |O
As someone who's had a variable power supply from the beginning, using wall warts would piss me off! I knew a guy who didn't get a bench PSU for years and just used batteries :palm: but he did well with what he had.
--- End quote ---
Prehistoricman thanks for the feedback. My concerns are that I will hit brick walls when doing projects and I have figured just get the gear while I have the money (before my wife spends it :-DD)., but seriously one of my concerns is that I find I am missing something and find my project gets held up while I wait for something to arrive from overseas.
Berni:
You don't really need a lab full of fancy test gear to do projects. Once you have a multimeter, oscilloscope and a decent soldering iron you are pretty much set for electronics. All the other gear tends to be rarely used and a lot of times the job can be done without it just fine(but might take longer).
The way i ended up with a pile of test gear in my lab is collecting old used equipment from places like ebay. Quite a few times the equipment i bought was in an unknown state or known to be broken. So it became a bit of a hobby to repair all this broken test gear since it feels rewarding at the end to have another new piece of gear in the lab after a successful repair. The old 10 to 40 year old gear might not have worlds best specs anymore but is not all that far behind modern stuff.
Some of the gear i have just because i found a good bargain and looked useful, not because i have an immediate use planned for it. That's how i end up with a 22GHz spectrum analyzer or 300A PSU or a Electrometer that measures down to femtoamps. The use for them might be very rare but they ware cheep and i think they are really cool (And eventually i do find a good use for them, but i often don't at time of purchase)
Just because you see some people having a huge wall of test gear on Youtube or forum theads (like this https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/whats-your-work-benchlab-look-like-post-some-pictures-of-your-lab/4025/ ) doesn't mean you need it to do electronics. Notice how almost everyone with a large collection of test gear have mostly just old equipment and very little in the way of brand new stuff, they are all used test gear collectors. The piles of test gear still cost quite a bit of money when summed together, but it is a fraction of the cost of brand new equipment (Especially if non Chinese).
Also where you get to learn the most about electronics is projects that don't involve a microcontroller. The world of analog is a lot more complicated and has a whole range of neat tricks to do impressive things with few components.
rhb:
The majority of my electronics projects were done in grad school with a 5 MHz, recurrent sweep, single channel Heathkit IO-18, a 50K/V VOM and a DMM from Radio Shack and a soldering iron. Everything else was bits I put together, op amp square wave generator, sub 10 ns single shot pulser made from a single 7400, 120 dB gain DC audio amp, etc.
Lots of test gear saves time, but you don't learn as much.
Before I launched into my recent TEA binge I was trying to fix my HP 8601A sweeper, but had no way to measure capacitor ESR. I spent a month or two essentially reinventing the Arduino based LCR meter and transistor tester before quitting work on it and giving myself permission to buy an ESR meter. That diversion into designing one has served me very well as it really forced me to think very closely to the behavior of capacitors, inductors and resisters in series. I was also working on a crystal test set based on Chris Trask's design with the intent of building an MCU based unit that would perform the tests automatically.
Have fun!
Reg
rstofer:
Most of my projects are based on development boards, MCUs or FPGAs. Sometimes these can be powered by USB but other times a little more power is required. In that case there will be a power jack and I can use a 5V 2.5A wall-wart that costs $13
https://store.digilentinc.com/search.php?Search=&search_query=power+supply
Look at those Power BRICS, they're kind of a neat solution to getting various voltages from a USB cable. That cable doesn't have to plug into your computer, it is better to provide power through a powered hub.
I'm not saying a lab supply isn't handy, it is. But it would be fairly far down my list of 'gotta haves'. In fact, it was darn near the bottom!
I bought a +-15V supply from Jameco for use with my op amp experiments.
https://www.jameco.com/z/PD-2515-MEAN-WELL-Power-Supply-Dual-Output-Open-Frame-15V-1A-Negative-15V-1A-24W_2100857.html
These cute little power supplies fit right on the end of a briadboard and provide both 3.3V and 5V as desired to either set of rails. So, you can have 3.3V on one red rail, 5V on the other red rail and the blue rails are tied together as ground. Input power can be from USB (I would use a powered hub) or 9V wall wart (6 to 12V is acceptable). Pretty neat
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/bud-industries/BBP-32701/377-2647-ND/8602382
There are a lot of ways to provide power. None of which diminish in any way the utility of the DP832. It's a great supply!
Everybody wants 0-30V 3A but I always wonder why? What could they possibly be building that would create 90W of heat and perhaps 195W if the entire supply is loaded. In the age of CMOS, projects don't take much power. Not that it isn't nice to future proof everything but, really, power needs are going down rapidly,
Things that do take 90W and up usually have a dedicated supply.
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