Whats your Work-Bench/lab look like? Post some pictures of your Lab.

[Bored@Work]

Hence the green nuts decided we should instead use CO2, which is fatal if you get stuck in the room with it.

No Inergen in the UK?

[SeanB]

Inergen is a nitrogen/argon/CO2 mix that displaces the oxygen in the room, so is just as fatal.

[Bored@Work]

Inergen is a nitrogen/argon/CO2 mix that displaces the oxygen in the room, so is just as fatal.

The idea with Inergen is to use it to lower (but not completely displace) the oxygen in the room, to the point that the remaining oxygen is no longer sufficient to support combustion, but still enough to barely support humans.

The idea with the carbon dioxide in Inergen is that after discharge it is diluted to roughly a 2% CO2 concentration in the room. This is supposed to triggers the human body to take deeper breath to make better use of the remaining oxygen in the space. This in turn is supposed to significantly increase your chance of surviving while the Inergen's nitrogen and argon does not do harm to the human body.

This requires a carefully planed and maintained system that doesn't just flood a room to the brim, but gets the balance between Inergen and remaining oxygen right.

As I wrote, I am not planning to test it, but I am happy that my employer changed to Inergen systems from a reputable manufacturer with proper maintenance, instead of the previous "kill everything in sight" approach.

[SeanB]

Still better than water or dry powder. Use that in a data centre and you better have good off site backups.

[M. András]

and much higher wallet to pay the losses

btw for electronics fire which is the proper type of fire extinguisher?

[Monkeh]

and much higher wallet to pay the losses

btw for electronics fire which is the proper type of fire extinguisher?

Powder or CO2 for anything electrical. For the little prototype you just wrecked, a good pair of lungs.

[T4P]

and much higher wallet to pay the losses

btw for electronics fire which is the proper type of fire extinguisher?

Best suited is dry powder... for a home type lab of course like mono ammonium phosphate
or CO2 which i hardly see around

[pickle9000]

Rules from my old shop (my rules guess why?)

FIRE

Keep chemicals off your bench.
Turn off bench power.
Fire extinguisher is located on the front leg of the bench.
Don't try to save equipment just put it out.
HV must be done on the HV bench!!

So nice to be retired (mostly retired anyway)

...mike

[SeanB]

Well, best is halon, as it is non corrosive, evaporates off and has no static problems. Does no further damage than the fire.

Next is CO2, no damage to equipment, but has a bad static generating potential and can actually ignite flammable gases. Best for your electronics as it is the only one available off the shelf, and with a good shelf life. Note, you do want to get a 2kg unit with an aluminium housing, it is a lot lighter to move around and mount.

Dry powder is best if you only want to put out the fire, as it is somewhat corrosive, goes everywhere and is difficult to clean out of equipment, you will probably scrap it afterwards. Good for fires involving flammable liquids and kitchens, as it will handle most fires there, with a powder that smothers most fires and is low enough velocity not to blow burning liquid all over.

Water is cheap, plentiful and will put out most fires eventually. Bad around electrics, electronics, but very good for wood, paper and building structural fires.Messy, and the runoff can carry burning liquids.

The most commonly available is dry powder, cheap and easy to store. Next is CO2, and then water.

[DaveW]

We ended up filming a tour round our workshop for our blog, this is the 3rd version of the workshop, and was built from scratch to be a workshop-what'cha think?



And some still pictures linked here, http://wattcircuit.com/the-workshops/

[w2aew]

You may have seen this - a lab tour as viewed on the screen of my oscilloscope:

[EEVblog]

We ended up filming a tour round our workshop for our blog, this is the 3rd version of the workshop, and was built from scratch to be a workshop-what'cha think?

Nice work, thanks for sharing.
"5 projects halfway through" - who hasn't!

Dave.

[ECUtech]

Just had a clean up so I posted my bench. This is a very busy automotive electronics workshop.
Last addition is a Rigol DG4062 arbitrary function generator for sending waveforms from the PC to the generator, however this function sadly does not work on firmware version 1.02 and updating does not work either. At a dead end with Rigol tech support. Anyway I digress, I'm thinking of adding some shelves for the equipment (3U 19" rack dimensions). Maybe some under shelf lighting also.

Kev.

[ErikTheNorwegian]

Well, best is halon, as it is non corrosive, evaporates off and has no static problems. Does no further damage than the fire.

Next is CO2, no damage to equipment, but has a bad static generating potential and can actually ignite flammable gases. Best for your electronics as it is the only one available off the shelf, and with a good shelf life. Note, you do want to get a 2kg unit with an aluminium housing, it is a lot lighter to move around and mount.

Dry powder is best if you only want to put out the fire, as it is somewhat corrosive, goes everywhere and is difficult to clean out of equipment, you will probably scrap it afterwards. Good for fires involving flammable liquids and kitchens, as it will handle most fires there, with a powder that smothers most fires and is low enough velocity not to blow burning liquid all over.

Water is cheap, plentiful and will put out most fires eventually. Bad around electrics, electronics, but very good for wood, paper and building structural fires.Messy, and the runoff can carry burning liquids.

The most commonly available is dry powder, cheap and easy to store. Next is CO2, and then water.

I do think You all think a little to complex, 

Most fires if detected early can be put out using a fireblanket, its a 130x150 cm thick dry (You can get wett ones for use on people, that cools burn victims ) fireproof blanket that you can put over the fire, the item that burns , wrap it up like a hot burrito and carry it out.
It doesn't pollute, kill ore anything bad, and can be reused.. nothing to clean up.   
It has a natural post on the wall beside the fire extinguisher.
Its cheap, just around 12 $.

[Rerouter]

ECUtech, that wouldnt happen to be a audi A3 dash now would it?

wouldnt happen to work in australia, sydney would you

(automotive instrumentation technition)

[ECUtech]

Correct, except not Sydney, and my main line of work is engine management electronics with a speciality in instrumentation. I can repair all sorts of automotive electronics be it ECU or ABS module, computerised window controls, climate control panels etc.
My favorite items on the bench are the Hakko iron and desolderer. Thinking of getting a JBC for the quick change tips. The Hameg 4 x 32v 3A is brilliant (new sense leads going on soon). The Tek TPS2014 is reliable (CF card, no USB)and the TEK 2465 with a noisey fan doesn't get much action. The 10x 20x stereo microscope is a must for the modern electronics. I use the Hung Chang FG for high voltage hazards and the Rigol DG1012 is a good arb generator but I wish channel 2 could go at least to 5v at 2.5v offset. I won't mention the DG4062. Anyone got a memory chip for me with 1.03 loaded? The GW Instek is accurate but slow in auto range. Under the packet of aspro is my Xeltek Superpro burner which has served me well for about ten years now. Oh and every bench should have a  good illuminated magnifier. I use it all day long since I can't focus on stuff close up these days.

Kev.

[StubbornGreek]

There are some nice setups here, I enjoyed looking through this thread.

@ free_electron, OMG your setup is pure EE pron right there.

Here's my little home lab:





Sorry about the quality, I shot these with my phone as I was having some issues with my camera.

[free_electron]

@ free_electron, OMG your setup is pure EE pron right there.

And i have added a few 'toys' over the weekend ....

- An agilent RF generator ( to 990 MHz ) - repaired-
- one more agilent 3 channel power supply -repaired-
- An Agilent LRC bridge ...  still working on this one

the RF generator had a burned out transformer. very strange. there was short in a wiring harness. i found a transformer on ebay for a slightly different machine ( but same series ) , checking the service manuals they looked the same ( same voltages ) . works fine

the 3 channel supply had a a brain fault : it powers up , beeps, does display test and reboots. endlessly. turns out it memory ( flash chip was corrupted ) so i cloned the firmware from the one i already had. works fine now .

THe LRC bridge had a shot input ranger ( analog mulitplexer ). there is still something wrong with the output as well. it gives fixed amplitude while it should be ranging...
very hard to troubleshoot without schematics... 4263B ... even schematics for an A would work ( same motherboard, different processor. ) but they seem to be made out of unobtainium ...

[DavidDLC]

Living in an apartment with no garage, I have no space for a office/lab, the wife does not like to see all the equipment plus cables, plus everything.

So I had to modified a computer furniture as my "lab" so when I finish working I just close the doors and you cannot see anything inside, the work space is not too big, but so far I'm happy with the results.

Attached is a picture when the mess formed when working, and a download from internet when the furniture is closed.

[StubbornGreek]

@ free_electron, OMG your setup is pure EE pron right there.

the 3 channel supply had a a brain fault : it powers up , beeps, does display test and reboots. endlessly. turns out it memory ( flash chip was corrupted ) so i cloned the firmware from the one i already had. works fine now .

^ Really nice additions. Curious, did you hardware troubleshoot the above or did it just make sense that it would be a memory issue. If HW, would you mind explaining how you identified the fault?

[StubbornGreek]

Living in an apartment with no garage, I have no space for a office/lab, the wife does not like to see all the equipment plus cables, plus everything.

So I had to modified a computer furniture as my "lab" so when I finish working I just close the doors and you cannot see anything inside, the work space is not too big, but so far I'm happy with the results.

Attached is a picture when the mess formed when working, and a download from internet when the furniture is closed.

That's pretty awesome.

[free_electron]

I have service manuals for that beastie. Hooked up the scope and watched the reset line ... that did NOT toggle.. so it was not a hardware reset ....
Errors like that are typically caused by and addressing problem in the processor... either bad ram or bad rom ... since the rom was in a socket i tried that first.
I dumped the rom from my working supply and tried reflashing the suspect one . It failed... the eprom programmer gave an error in a certain location. So now i was sure the rom was bad. Simple 29c020 flash rom in plcc . Went to the local junkstore and got a few for 1$. Done.

[ThunderSqueak]

*plays "spot the rigol DS1052E" in each picture*   

[Bored@Work]

*plays "spot the rigol DS1052E" in each picture*   

And? How did it work out?

[ThunderSqueak]

found an average of 2 per page ^^