Electronics > Beginners

Useful Homemade lab gear

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Mint.:
Hey fellas, I'm starting my own electronics lab in a few weeks and I just need some ideas on the must have or extremely helpful gear that you can make yourself for your lab (such as power supplies, resistor boxes, etc.), and if you wouldn't mind please add a schematic diagram too if possible. Hopefully if this goes will it won't be useful to myself but to other people on the forum too.
-Thanks  :)

johnboxall:
Here's a start - http://www.eevblog.com/2011/04/30/eevblog-168-how-to-set-up-an-electronics-lab/

RCMR:
Building your own gear for the workshop (be it electronic or mechanical) is (IMHO) one of the most rewarding things you can do.

The great thing about having enough tools and enough knowledge is that you can then extend that basic tool/knowledge-set almost without limit by building on what you have.

My engineering workshop has many cool tools that I've built myself, including a metal-spinning lathe, pipe-bender, spot-welder and a myriad of other 'special purpose" additions that I've built because I needed them and they made a great project that taught me new skills while also saving me money.

The same goes in the lab.

I remember when I was an impoverished small business owner working on RF gear (mainly CB radios) back in the 1970s and all I could afford was a 5MHz scope.  I simply built a beat-oscillator and mixer to effectively extend the useful bandwidth of that scope to the 27MHz I needed to get a picture of the modulation envelope of those CB radios.

I've also built countless bits of test-gear over the years and each one was a fun project.

Just make sure you get some good basic equipment to start with (scope, DMM, etc) from which you can start your building process and against which you can calibrate your new creations.

As for what you ought to be building -- that entirely depends on what you plan to do in your lab.  The needs of an RF engineer/experimenter tend to be different to those of a digital engineer/experimenter so different tools have different values to each.

hacklordsniper:
There are great kits on the net and eBay. This will prove much more worthy than following somebodies else shematics and will probably work from first try.

alm:
Kits more worthy? Easier and more likely to succeed, sure, but also much less instructive. Starting with a schematic and having to choose parts requires some understanding of the circuit, as opposed to the paint by the numbers approach of most kits.

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