People say that the use of tools is the most significant difference between humans and animals. This is why I will show you eight tools I consider most important for our electronics hobby, and I will discuss the choices to make: where you can save your money, and where it is wise to spend a little more. Greetings YouTubers, here is the guy with the Swiss accent with a new episode and fresh ideas around sensors and microcontrollers Let's start with a list It will not include household tools like scissors or screwdrivers and I cluster them into different categories In each group I try to start with the most needed one and sometimes will also cover some additional products. In addition, You will get a few tricks I use on a daily basis. The eight tools are power supply, pliers and strippers, soldering iron, hot air, microscope, multimeter, oscilloscope, and 3D printer. Let's start with power supplies. The cheapest way is to use batteries to power our experiment, like Julian Ilett on his YouTube channel. The most significant disadvantage of this solution is you cannot limit the current, and so will easily destroy your parts if you create a short-circuit. Also, you never get precisely 3.3 or 5v out of batteries. A step up is to use a switching power supply like this one. Simple and very powerful. Perfect for all digital circuits. If you plan also to work with sensitive analog sensors or audio, you probably have to use a linear power supply like this one. It produces less noise and can save you a lot of time and nerves but only for delicate applications. A general rule here. I bought this bench power supply secondhand on eBay. This is an excellent choice for equipment which does not develop fast like power supplies. It makes less sense, for example, for oscilloscopes where the price has drastically come down over the last few years. If you do not already have them, I would add a few breadboards. Unfortunately, I do not know of any quality ones, so you can save your money and buy the cheapest. They all seem to be more or less the same quality: usable, but not great. Because we will work a lot with wires and cables, you need at least small pliers. You easily can buy these cheap ones. Only if you want to spend the money, you can go for a branded product. In any case, just cut copper wire with them. For all other purposes, use heavy-duty pliers like this one, to keep the copper of the wires intact. I strongly suggest using a cheap stripper to tear the insulation apart. More expensive ones are not worth the money, and are even harder to handle. Pay attention! These come in two sizes: for small wires, you need the one which covers 28 AWG. If you want to manufacture your own cables, pay attention. Which crimp will you buy? In video number 39, I show the differences. Please also read the comments of the video before you buy a crimper. Most makers will solder, and need the equipment. The choices are many and start with a cheapo USB soldering iron as a starter. This is okay. And the power is astonishing, but I only recommend it for very tight budgets. I used this AOYUE combined soldering station for a few years, and I liked the combination of a soldering iron, fume remover, and hot air station. When it started to create problems, I decided to switch the concept and use a TS-80, or TS-100 soldering iron. The performance of this new design with integrated heating elements is exceptional, and they are small and light. I do not see why I should spend more money on the soldering iron or even on a station. By the way, I had to change to a custom firmware on the TS to be able to use it with this bliss wolf qc3 charger. We will cover hot air later. With a soldering iron come three essential things: solder, flux, and alcohol. Flux is much more important than many of you think. With flux, all beginners improve their soldering capabilities by factors. You get the flux in three ways. First it is inside the solder wire, by the way, I absolutely do not recommend lead-free solder for makers and also, most of the Chinese solder I had in my hands did not work right. I do not exactly know why. This is why I spent once around thirty dollars for this massive spool of genuine 0.6 millimeter Kester solder. It will most probably last until the end of my life, and save me a lot of nerves until then. You get smaller quantities for a cheaper price, and this holder by the way, is perfect. Next you get fluid flux. I have it in this small bottle with a needle. Perfect! Like that, you can apply it to your PCBs exactly where needed. The third form is not used a lot. The flux is nearly solid and I use it to stick wires into it before tinning them. With flux comes also alcohol to remove remains without any problems. A word of warning: never try acetone for that purpose. It will dissolve some of your plastic. This is why I have no acetone in my lab. Too dangerous for me. I have it in another room. To deal with fumes from soldering I use now a poor-man's solution: a strong cooling fan of a PC with a 3D-printed foot. I know it only distributes the fumes but here I go with Paracelsus. "The dose makes the poison." If I open the window during soldering, the concentration stays very low. Also because I do not solder large batches. What about hot air? It becomes essential if you want to work with SMD parts. A word about SMD technology itself: if you think SMD is harder than through-hole, you are entirely wrong. This says an old guy with bad eyes, who did through-hole for nearly his whole life. Try it and you will love it. If you have two additional tools in your lab: good tweezers, and a real binocular. The difference between the cheap and the more expensive tweezers is here at the tips. The cheap one does not pick thin or small things. When the AOYUE became dodgy, I jumped into the cold water and bought this expensive hot air station. I never regretted it, because of two facts: It switches automatically on and off if you remove the gun from its holder, and it heats up in record time. We all know that these guns are one of the loudest devices in our lab, and this brilliant device reduces the sound by nearly 100 percent because it only runs when needed. Worth every cent in my eyes. If you do not want to spend so much, you can also buy one of those integrated guns. I never owned one, but maybe someone with experience can recommend one. The next tool is the binocular microscope. Maybe it is not necessary for young people. I do no more remember my view back then. For all others, I use this instrument every day, more than once. I would never buy a USB microscope again. They are pretty much useless for soldering. Why that for reasons? First you have no stereoscopic view, and therefore do not see distances. Second, the distance between the lens and the PCB is very small for working. Third, all these microscopes have a small or a long delay between the movement of your hand and what you see on the screen, and fourth, because you look at the screen, you do not look in the direction of your hands, this needs some training for your brain to deal with that. All in all, it is very hard to solder with a USB microscope. Even the cheapest optical binocular is better than a USB microscope. By the way, you only need small magnifications of less than ten times. In video number 70, you find a lot of information on how to select a proper binocular. Now, we come to the invisible stuff. Electricity is not readily visible for humans, and we need some tools here. The most important one is a multimeter. Today the precision is no more an issue. Even the cheapest meter is good enough for most of us. One difference is significant, do you want to have a portable or a bench multimeter? Because portable meters run on batteries, they have an auto-switch-off function. Some of them can be switched on by a button, but some can only be switched on by turning the main knob to off and on again. Not very comfortable. Bench power supplies are always on, but usually more expensive. I suggest buying a multimeter with auto-ranging, because it is annoying to interrupt a measurement if you found the right points on your PCB and the range is not correct. This is called a nerd's coitus interruptus. I would not spend a lot on additional functions like capacity or transistor testing on a multimeter. I would rather suggest buying one of these cheap transistor testers. In reality, they are much more than that: they measure diodes, resistors, capacitors, and some even inductors, and they can distinguish between different parts like field effect or bipolar junction transistors. An absolute must for every maker, especially if you do not know all these colors on the resistors by heart, and even then you can sometimes be wrong by a factor of 10. I test all my resistors before I use them, and before I store them away. Because the voltage is not always constant, we often need instruments to display variables. The first choice for that is an oscilloscope. Here, we have three options. Cheapo do-it-yourself, portable USB, and bench oscilloscopes. I strongly suggest a bench oscilloscope as your first one. Why? You will never be happy with these cheap ones, because their capability in frequency and voltage range is minimal. And the worst? You do not see it if the displayed results are wrong, and search for the mistake in your project. Only a very experienced person would see that the lack of bandwidth is the reason. The same applies to these portable ones. They are also very limited and the price difference to a cheap bench oscilloscope is not so big. In addition, they are very fiddly to use. USB oscilloscopes might be a good thing. Just keep in mind that if something happens, not only your USB oscilloscope is dead, also your PC can be killed if you do not use one of those USB isolators. But which bench oscilloscope is right? First, stick with one of the main brands: Keysight, Rigol or Siglent. For a maker, one hundred megahertz usually is good enough and two channels are also okay. More channels sometimes can help with complicated problems. Higher frequency only if you plan to do some high frequency stuff. Also, keep in mind that all models in one series use the same software. So also the cheapest model has all functionality of the more expensive ones. The difference is frequency range and number of channels. Displaying rectangular signals need an oscilloscope which is capable to at least measure three times the frequency of the signal. Otherwise, it will be displayed as a sine wave, even if it is a logical signal. So a 100 megahertz oscilloscope is good for logic signals up to 30 megahertz - maximum. Usually even less. I strongly recommend buying one of those small logic analyzers, especially if you do not have an oscilloscope. This device is invaluable. For less than $10, you get a tool which displays and decodes all sorts of digital signals. If you have problems with your i2c bus, your serial connection or just a conventional logic signal, this tool helps. You can watch video number 72 if you want to know how it is used. There is hardly no excuse not to own one of those. The last tool is my 3D printer. When I started with my lab, I wanted a mill and used it for many projects. Since I bought my first 3D printer, this mill is hardly used anymore. Mainly because 3D printing is much easier than milling and needs less attention. If you can spend the money, a 3d printer is a must - not only for the lab. I also made my wife happy by printing broken or missing parts. A last word. You find all videos mentioned here and a few more in the playlist "Tips and Tricks," and all links to the products in the video description. I hope this video was useful or at least interesting for you. If true, please consider supporting the channel to secure its future existence. You find the links in the description. Thank you. Bye.
