General Feedback on Proposed Tools List

[Binaryb3n]

Hey Forum! Thanks for being a great resource, I really look forward to getting to know the community better. 

Okay, so I would like to be able to design and build my own circuits. I would understandably like to purchase some tools to help me with this as well. Essentially, I am starting from nothing (assume no knowledge as well, because I don't 100% trust the knowledge that I've gained from my limited experiences in the past).

As far as I know, I plan to primarily work with embedded electronics in a semi-professional manner – I want to design and develop my own products – and I'd also like to build audio projects (amplifiers, instruments, turn tables, speakers, etc.) and robotics more as a hobby. Of course, I'd like to dabble with other interesting projects as they come up, so I am keen to ensure I have tools that won't be limiting if possible.

In terms of what sort of tools I am thinking about, there are a couple of considerations I've kept in mind. I don't mind spending money, but I don't always have a lot of it. That said, I prefer to spend more money on a tool for life that I know I'll use, and I'd prefer to get a tool for life when it comes to electronics, at least where it makes sense.

It seems that multimeters, scopes, soldering stations and certain hand tools seem to fit in that category? I also know that I will be soldering electronics and assembling circuits for a long time, and would like to get to a point where I can do my own small manufacturing runs for personal products/projects. I'll need tools that can handle that. I am hoping to build up a semi-professional collection of tools over the next 6-12 months. Feedback keeping that in mind would be great.

If possible, I would love to be told I am not crazy (or am at least in good company), and that I am on a good track in terms of developing a long lasting collection of valuable tools. Otherwise, any feedback (negative and positive) would be appreciated – or just general hello's and pointers to other good resources. Thanks! (I've included the list of tools in the second post for sake of keeping the OP as easy to read as possible)


Wow, does this forum have a lot of features! What are the main uses of glowing scrolling text?     Well, this makes me smile at least...! 

[Binaryb3n]

Testing Equipment

Starting with the obvious. I keep reading it's important to have a few DMMs. Save your life and be able to keep working; cross reference readings; etc. I've been toying with the idea of starting by getting a Fluke 101 and a 17B+ to start with, and then saving for a second hand 87V and getting another 101 in the future. Thoughts?

This would give me four in total; two "cheap" semi-disposable multimeters, and two feature filled meters. Apparently the common $15 pocket meters would typically suffice as a "cheap" secondary meter, but I've seen a few videos essentially torture testing the 101's and I was left fairly (maybe naively?) impressed. It seems that a) the 101 would be likely to survive most things I would expect to encounter and b) even if something did blow up the meter, then it's still only $50 gone (vs. $15) compared to possibly a life? It also seems like the 87V will be all I'll ever need (most likely overkill actually), and the 17B+ represents a good balance of price and features from a known brand in the mean time.. Please let me know if I am missing the mark here though.

I have heaps of questions about oscilloscopes - enough for another thread. So I'll open another thread after I post this. Beyond scopes and function generators though, is there any other essential and major testing equipment that I have missed? At the moment, I am hoping to focus on the bigger ticket items that I need to save for, and I'll purchase the smaller things as I need them over time.

Soldering Equipment

I have been looking a lot at the Hakko FM-203. I know it's not the best soldering station the money can buy (PACE, Ersa, Metcal, JBC, etc. as alternatives), but I like that it can have two irons at once and enough power to run tweezers (albeit, without a second iron - but that should be okay for workflows that use tweezers?). It seems like it offers the most flexibility from the one station, within my price bracket at least. From there, I was planning on eventually owning 4 irons and various tips – 2x FM2027 "standard" irons for if I want to use two different tips at once, 1x FM2032 "micro" irons for smaller SMD work, and 1x FM2023 "tweezers" for SMD rework. Again, this feels like a good balance of tools for a given price. And again, please tell me if I am wrong.

On the flip side, it seems that a hot air station isn't suggested as something to spend a lot of money on around here unless you are desoldering all day every day. Is this accurate? As such, I've been looking at the Quick or Atten branded models - there seems to be some community effort to hack these as well which looks like fun. Any particular ones to avoid, or to look at? I think the Quick branded ones look nicer, but I don't know which work better (with or without hacking).

Power!

I plan to build my own power supplies as one of my first projects. They look like fun and fairly easy to tackle. Plenty of good tutorials exit, and at worse, I can hack an ATX PSU if I come to that. I'm thinking that I would like a variable bench top power supply (again DIY), but that I'll at least need some fixed supplies to start with. So I am looking at getting a few wall warts, rechargeable batteries and clips, and a few breadboard attachments. Anything else power wise, or will that cover 90% of my expected use cases?

Hand Tools

Something I do have experience with! I am usually pretty comfortable choosing my own brands and quality of hand tools thankfully. Instead, can I write a list of some of the core hand tools I expect I'll need and can you point out anything I do or don't need from there?

• Screwdrivers (jewellers, standard and combination/security sets)
• Side cutters
• ESD safe tweezers (strong, straight, wide grip)
• Dental picks
• Pliers (large flat, large needle nose, jewellers size)
• Wire strippers
• Small spanner set (+ sockets?)
• Allen key set
• Files
• Nibbler
• Scalpel
• Engineering Ruler
• Measuring tape
• Digital Calipers
• All the iFixIt tools!! Haha

Everything Else..

Obviously, I'm going to need components, safety equipment, adhesives/hot glue guns, parts, consumables, microcontrollers/SBC's, etc. For now, big stuff first. I do have access to a lot of the smaller tools from various places to start with, and as I said, I'll start with focusing on the big ticket items and buy small things week to week. I'll no doubt ask questions about these things in the future though. Otherwise, if I have missed anything obvious or essential, please do share.

Also, I know I probably could get started with a quality wall socket soldering iron, 9V battery, a few components, a $15-50 DMM, some pliers and screw drivers and start building. For whatever reason, I tend to find this method of building up a collection of things project by project fairly demotivating though. I find I learn best if I have a nice collection of quality tools and a decent collection of material (or in this case, components) to just work and explore with. If you have a really good case as to why this is a bad idea, please tell me (my partner may be happy for a case to be made, though she seems fairly supportive of this as well). I will certainly be all ears, but otherwise, if I can get away with buying the tools once and forgetting about them from there, I will be a happy man.

[rstofer]

You'll be going nowhere in embedded projects without a scope.  You will only marginally need a DMM (once you check Vcc, it's done with) but you will inevitably get into SPI communications and you will want to decode it.  To do this, you will need a 4 channel scope.  Yes, I struggled along for a very long time with a two channel scope but a couple of days ago I started using the decode features on my Rigol DS1054Z and life got a lot simpler.

Same story for I2C and, to a lesser extent, RS232.  RS232 can be handled quite nicely on a two channel scope because there is no chip select or clock signal.

Choose wisely on the scope.  The 1054Z will decode I2C, SPI, RS232 and parallel BUT it will only decode what is on the screen.  Specifically, the entire transaction has to be visible (or at least the beginning, in the case of SPI).  More costly scopes will decode the entire buffer and that is certainly nice but, in my view, meaningless.  How long will an SPI transaction be (in terms of bytes)?  Again, in my view, they will be less than a dozen bytes.  I have no intention of scrolling through an entire 2kb IP packet!  I certainly don't plan to dump an EPROM to my scope screen.  I'm satisfied with the 1054Z approach to decoding, others have a different point of view.

I do my debugging with printf(), not a scope search of a massive datastream!

There seem to be two 'first projects':  Blinking an LED with a 555 timer and building a power supply.  Mostly, I use wall warts, batteries or simple 78xx linear regulators.  I still don't have a bench supply although I am getting closer to buying one.  Something like the Rigol DP832 hacked to enhance resolution (details elsewhere).  That's pretty much an overkill but I do like the metering.  I actually NEED +-15V and 5V although having the 5V supply adjustable to 3.3V would be nice (and it is on the DP832).  Having current limit and a display of voltage and current is a very nice feature.  But the scope comes first!

Some kind of signal generator might be handy when you want to fool around with analog circuits.  A variable frequency square wave generator might be nice for embedded work but I could probably come close enough with another Arduino.

Hand tools come along as they do.  No need to get spend hundreds of dollars.

Soldering iron:  I have a Hakko 936 (out of production) and I bought a Hakko FX-888D for my grandson.  It works well.  I have a hot air gun and have used it only a couple of times.  Instead, I reflow solder small boards on a Hotplate and larger boards in a converted Black & Decker InfraWave Toaster Oven.

Back to the scope:  The DS1054Z starts life as a 50 MHz scope and decoding only as a time limited feature.  There is a well known hack that increases the bandwidth to 100 MHz and turns on the decoding options permanently.  Or you can pay extra for the options, your choice!  The $400 scope turns out to have all of the decoding plus 100 MHz bandwidth and 4 channels.  There is simply no other scope in that price range with those features.  Yes, there are some highly publicized 'bugs' at the edges.  Not the kind of thing I will ever run into.  Perfect?  No!  But a great value.

DMMs?  Well, yes, they are useful.  I have one of the high priced Fluke 189s and a similar Vichy VC99.  I tend to use my EEVBlog Brymen BM235.  Mostly I just use them to check Vcc.  How many 'features' do I really need?  Maybe get a couple of simple DMMs and wait on the high $ unit.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/vichy-vc99-multimeter-review-and-teardown/

[Binaryb3n]

Thanks for the feedback @rstofer. I think I would love to get a scope and the DS1054Z was the one I was contemplating pulling the trigger on. That said, I'll try to leave discussion about that in the other thread I created for that, as I'm concerned this thread might get too messy by focusing on the questions I have re:scopes AND the more general feedback I am hoping to receive here.

There seem to be two 'first projects':  Blinking an LED with a 555 timer and building a power supply.

I've heard this sentiment echo'ed a lot, and I'll probably end up building some power supplies because I can more than anything - as you say, it's a typical 'first project' and I like some of the cool compact supplies made by members of instructables for example. It is very likely I'd be able to get by with some wall warts and fixed power sources + regulators as you have though, and where I will definitely be starting.

Some kind of signal generator might be handy when you want to fool around with analog circuits.  A variable frequency square wave generator might be nice for embedded work but I could probably come close enough with another Arduino.

I had been considering if something like a Diligent Analog Discovery 2 might fulfill this tool? I mentioned it in the other thread. If you have any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear it.

Soldering iron:  I have a Hakko 936 (out of production) and I bought a Hakko FX-888D for my grandson.  It works well.  I have a hot air gun and have used it only a couple of times.  Instead, I reflow solder small boards on a Hotplate and larger boards in a converted Black & Decker InfraWave Toaster Oven.

The Hakko 951 also caught my eye (an upgrade from the 936 perhaps? Or is the 888 series the upgrade?). That said, I really did like the flexibility of being able to have either two irons (plus I can teach others with two irons which is something else I am keen to do), or enough power for tweezers. Tweezers seem to be very much a user preference thing, but my gut feeling is that I'll like using them. I suspect that I will use a hot air station more for things like heat shrinking than actual soldering work and like you, will use a toaster over or similar. The other thought is, the USB solder paste dispensers look quite handy and like a good way of soldering SMD components. More research I suppose.

Any reason you can think of for or against the FM-203 though?

DMMs?  Well, yes, they are useful.  I have one of the high priced Fluke 189s and a similar Vichy VC99.  I tend to use my EEVBlog Brymen BM235.  Mostly I just use them to check Vcc.  How many 'features' do I really need?  Maybe get a couple of simple DMMs and wait on the high $ unit.

Yeh, that's why I was looking at the 101 (pretty much just Vcc, ohms and basic [slow] continuity testing). Thought I'd throw in a 17B+ to start with and see how I go from there. Given the price of the other equipment, the price of a 17B+ won't break the bank. But I will certainly be waiting before buying an 87V - even a second hand one. Would you recommend against the 101's for any reason?

[rstofer]

The Hakko 951 also caught my eye (an upgrade from the 936 perhaps? Or is the 888 series the upgrade?). That said, I really did like the flexibility of being able to have either two irons (plus I can teach others with two irons which is something else I am keen to do), or enough power for tweezers. Tweezers seem to be very much a user preference thing, but my gut feeling is that I'll like using them. I suspect that I will use a hot air station more for things like heat shrinking than actual soldering work and like you, will use a toaster over or similar. The other thought is, the USB solder paste dispensers look quite handy and like a good way of soldering SMD components. More research I suppose.

Any reason you can think of for or against the FM-203 though?

I can think of about 400 reasons for not buying the FM-203.  I simply have no need for a $500 soldering iron(s).  I have a similar point of view for the 951.  I just don't need that much soldering iron.  And, yes, I do a bunch of 'drag soldering' of SMDs with my plain vanilla chisel tip iron.

Yeh, that's why I was looking at the 101 (pretty much just Vcc, ohms and basic [slow] continuity testing). Thought I'd throw in a 17B+ to start with and see how I go from there. Given the price of the other equipment, the price of a 17B+ won't break the bank. But I will certainly be waiting before buying an 87V - even a second hand one. Would you recommend against the 101's for any reason?

Apparently, the 101 is designed for electricians.  At least that's what I found when I went for a brief search.  I like the features of the VC99 and I didn't intend to downplay their utility earlier.  I like being able to verify capacitor values.  I check all of my SMD components before I solder them in place (or set them in solder paste for reflow soldering).  I like Fluke, generally, but I would stick with the meters intended for electronics.  Actually, the EEVBlog meter is pretty nice but it's kind of pricey.  I bought it to support the effort.  Actually, I bought two of them.  Of the 17B+ vs 101, definitely the 17B+.  I have very little use for the advanced features of the Fluke 189.  I bought it as another retirement gift to me...