Essential Tools For An Electronics Lab

[Music] today we're setting up the electronics lab hello and welcome back to Noel's retro app I still need to set up the electronics lab over in that room at this location so let's use this as an opportunity to learn what kind of tools are necessary for an Electronics lab and most importantly where it's worth spending some money and where you can get away with something cheaper one important thing to keep in mind is the kind of projects you are going to be doing in the electronics lab I do a lot of things with 80s computers 8-bit 16-bit computers that kind of thing and the tool choices that I make might be different than you if you're doing smartphone repairs for example or electronic musical instruments so one of the most important things that you're going to need for an Electronics lab is a surface to work on normally a simple desk is good enough I have this large corner desk that is going to be awesome but before that in my previous location in Spain I was just using a small Ikea desk and that worked perfectly fine if you have something this big one really great idea is to kind of organize how you're going to be using it so I'm planning on doing most Diagnostics here so probably using the oscilloscope kind of fall finding and then this head over here is going to be more of an assembly station that I'm going to be doing mostly soldering and this part over here is going to be mostly for storage things tend to accumulate a lot around your workbench so all the storage around it is very good there are two very important things with any kind of workbench that you have and one of them is power access I set up two outlets underneath the bench and that's going to be for all the tools that I'm going to have connected in addition to those whenever I finally build the shelves that are going to go on top of this workspace I'm planning on putting some power strips in there as well and to connect the things that I'm working on and I want to be able to toggle those on and off separately from all the other power in the workbench and then the other thing that you really want to have in your workbench is a good light system I've set up here this temporarily until I finally make those shelves with built-in lights but even so this is great because you can move it around and it even has a magnifying glass on top that can be quite helpful to look at things closely when you're soldering or you're doing something else and you don't want to pull out a microscope or some glasses or something so this is a pretty handy light no matter what so next let's talk about hand tools and maybe it's a surprise to some of you to talk about hand tools this high up in the importance list but really without these you're not even getting into the electronics that you need to do things with for screwdrivers you mostly want a couple Phillips of different sizes you'll end up needing a few flat screwdrivers because some of those old computers use those unfortunately and you don't need much else for a few other weird things you could get one of those cheap sets on Amazon or whatever and they will have every kind of screwdriver type that you need this is more relevant for more modern kind of things so whenever I have to open up my MacBook Pro I had to use this or an iPhone you might need to do some of this another alternative and this is only if you have the spare money I have here a fantastic set of screwdrivers by weira I think that's how it's pronounced and this was sent to me by Channel supporter scott. and that was an awesome surprise these are really handy because apart from having in a wide variety of formats they have this spinning thing in the back so it makes it really comfortable to screw and unscrew things but really you do not need to spend the money on that unless you want to a basic set of screwdrivers will get you there for pliers though I actually do not recommend getting something very cheap they're mostly going to be very frustrating to work with and you may end up damaging the things that you're trying to grip and slipping and things like that so I spent a little bit more and these particular ones come from Schmidt which is a German company so I ended up picking a long needle nose plier a slightly smaller one whenever you need you know a stronger grip a bent a needle nose plier and a set of Cutters these are the ones I used in my previous lab and they were fantastic so I just wanted to repeat the experience and with Cutters it's kind of the same you don't want to get the total bottom of the barrel thing because you'll use it a few times and then it will be dull and it won't cut anymore really the the blades will deform so I recommend something like like this I think this is a hako cutter and that's only about 10 12 the Schmidt ones are also great those are even sturdier but they're a little bit pricier but I think these are great and I think you can get them from Amazon as well for about that price for something like wire strippers they're really not that necessary for the kind of things we do but if you like it there you can get one you don't need anything expensive for this we are not going to be stripping cables all day long that they will come in handy sometimes though and finally another really useful tool are tweezers these will come in really handy when you do any kind of SMD soldering or sometimes even just to hold some cables in place while you're sliding them around and you know getting them in place for soldering them somewhere you really don't need that many ones at least for the kind of things that I do but you know they give us a set and that's totally fine they are perfectly serviceable one thing I like to mention now is that I'm going to be showing several tools that were sent to me free of charge by the companies and sometimes by Channel supporters the agreement was that they would send me whatever tools and if I enjoy them I could make a video about them or they would simply show up in different videos so there's actually nothing here that is sponsored or that I'm getting paid to say those things but I will make sure that I put the links and I tell you what I got them from in case you want to get the exact same model so with that out of the way let's talk about multimeters which is maybe the most important tool in the whole Lab this is the most basic set of multimeter this was sent to me by circuit specialists and they sell kind of electronic equipment in the US and you can probably buy something like this for about twenty dollars I believe this really is all you need with this you'll be totally fine with all the functionality for the kind of things at least that I do the display is very big and everything this is like the very traditional the one downside is that it doesn't have an odor range so you need to select the approximate magnitude that you expect the measurement so if you're measuring resistance and you're expecting something about 100 kilo ohms then you put it in a maximum of 200k if you measure something much lower than that you're just going to get maxed out or if you measure something much higher you're going to get zero you can work with that it's a little bit of a pain so really I would recommend spending just a little bit more I think in the 40 to 50 range you can get a uni T1 like the one I had in my previous lab it was very similar to this but it had an auto range so you simply say you want DC voltage measurement and it takes care of figuring out what the range is and that honestly that makes life a lot easier another possibility in that same price range with that same functionality is something like this one this was was sent to me by K weeds and this one is interesting because it it's not the traditional form of a multimeter instead it uses this really big screen so let's turn it on so it feels more like a like a smartphone and you know economics is a it's a huge screen and they get away with the whole dial in the middle which is a very traditional thing and this one even goes even further than that it makes it auto so you don't even have to say whether you want voltage resistance or continuity uh I really don't like that so I'd like to to set the actual function but you can do that just fine here you just repeat it presses you say Okay DC voltage or we're going to measure resistance and the range is automatic so that's just like the unity one and the display is super big and bright so that might be a big draw for some people and one the the only things that I don't absolutely love about this is the placement of the cables they they're a little awkward like that instead of being in the top like most of them are and then it doesn't have that tab in the back like this other one so you can't easily stand it on the work desk while you're working on something so it's mostly intended to be laying flat but other than that it's great a big upgrade from that and also a big upgrade in money is this fluke um multimeter this was sent to me by again Channel supporter scott. and thanks again that was uh that was an amazing surprise this one shows what I was talking about earlier here you just select ac voltage or DC voltage and it doesn't Auto Range it even says it there um you can actually specify the range if you want to but the default is just an auto range which is great and this particular one is you know a really really good multimeter it's it's very accurate the the cables are really good they're they're more flexible than the other ones so uh you know I'll be using this one mostly but the other ones are total worthwhile and honestly if I were just going to buy a single one I would buy one of the 50 range here the unity or the cow weeds and you know depending on your preferences however there's one more possible multimeter and you don't have to have test one you can have many of them this one was sent to me by B-side and it's a little bit like the kawitz one so it's a full screen that should look quite similar very very bright screen but the cool thing here is just how tiny it is obviously you still need to connect the leads but this is super tiny and so this will be great not so much for the lab but to take with you places if you know you need to repair something at a friend's house or you need to do some surfacing of something this is really cool just to be able to take it there I mean you can almost put this in your pocket it's this is not much bigger than a phone depending on your phone this might be a smaller so this is a very cool option I still haven't exported enough but it seems that's something that I could definitely see myself take into Retro meets and and things like that instead of logging something bigger time to talk about soldering irons one mistake that I see a lot of people make is that they actually get the cheapest soldering iron in Amazon and they try to use it and that's just a recipe for disaster the main problem with those is that you can't adjust the temperature in any way so it's either going to be too low or most likely it's too high a temperature intended for other uses and you're just going to destroy whatever you're using so what I usually tell people is to use something like this which is a cheap but adjustable temperature soldering station this particular one was sent to me by two Auto this is their own brand and it's actually an amazing deal I've been using it for a while and it's very similar to the one that I was using in Spain and it has all the features that I want and actually a few more so as soon as you turn it on you see the temperature that the tip is at and you can regulate what you want it to be just by moving the knob so I have a set of two to 320 and yeah it gets there really quickly that's actually surprisingly good for such an inexpensive set so I'm very happy with that another very nice feature about this particular set is that it uses soldering tips that are hacko compatible and it comes with a set of them as usual they come with really thin tips change it right away into something more of a chisel tip which it does come with one so that's great and then it's also really nice that it comes with a metal sponge thing for scrubbing the tip and then a regular sponge to wet it and get it really nice and clean so I really like those two things as well the other things that it comes with it comes with some solder which is not something that I'm going to use this is um lead free solder which I really don't like for my obligations I never have a good results with them but this attaches here and you can put whatever you want so that's nice I will be using this particular slider from Kestrel I have a whole video about solder recommendations and soldering tips techniques I'll link to that in the corner and in the description if you want to see more about that I definitely recommend upgrading the the solder to something like this and then if that wasn't enough this also comes with a desolder sucker which it seems fine it's functional I would probably use something like this instead this is a metal one so and it has like a silicone tip but I've used ones like this before and they're fine so it it's a great starter set and it even comes with a set of tweezers so really I mean for about forty dollars which is what this costs in Amazon this is an amazing amazing value yes you can go up from here and get more expensive solder stations and what you're going to get are primarily two things is going to get up to speed faster and this was really fast already and the other one is you may have better heat transfer so when you're working on a really tough ground plane and you put your soldering iron there the temperature on the iron is not going to drop as much as it is going to be it's just going to in this one but really again for the kind of applications that I tend to do this is going to be totally fine when I'm working on a really tough ground plane I'll just crank up the temperature to 420 450 if I want to go crazy and just for that and then I'll I'll go back down to 320 for regular soldering application of chips so I definitely recommend this one or something along these lines and now we have a soldering station you may be tempted to place a nice silicon mat on the workbench to protect it of course bad idea and have been guilty of this myself since silicon is non-conductive it turns out a charge can accumulate on the top and then it gets discharged the moment you put probably your most precious electronic device on top I actually didn't realize that for many years but it became very obvious once I received this and I removed the shrink wrap it came in and it was crackling with static probably for several hours so that was not a good beginning for this which actually was good because it made me research it and realized that this was actually a really bad idea so having said that this is a better place for it actually just kidding this will be pretty useful for other non-electronic projects like I'm sure my daughter would love it for some of her crafts so really what I want is an ESD mat or it should be called an anti-esd mat it's just too much of a mouthful and I'm going to go ahead and install this one sent to me by Steve over at United control static products they're a small us-based company and they have a wide variety of mats for different uses and actually very reasonable prices I obviously haven't tried this mat yet but you'll see me using it in just about every video coming up so I'll probably have lots to say about it soon okay so this was a little tricky because of the curved shape of the desk at a corner desk would be already a little difficult but being curved made it extra difficult so I had to cut it up into two different pieces and then I didn't have enough for this third section over here but it's okay this was I even said it earlier this is mostly intended storage I ended up with an extra odd shaped piece that if I really want to I could do something like this later I can cut it up a little bit the thing though is not just the mat itself is that the mat needs to be connected to ground so because now there are two separate pieces I'm gonna have to ground each of them separately which is not a big deal but I don't really feel the need to add a third one yet this mat is somewhat heat resistant but not nearly as much as the silicone mat and certainly not enough for a full hot soldering iron tip just for the sake of tradition I'm going to test a hot iron tip on the solder mat but this time I'm going to be smart and not do it in the middle of it instead I'm going to use this spare piece that I got while cutting it oh wow so it's not charring like that other one that I use the the green one that I had gotten from AliExpress so that already is way better and I mean I can just use my finger and it's mostly got I mean yeah I guess it would do some permanent damage but nothing that's noticeable and and hopefully it doesn't damage it in your last match so that right there is already better than the other one one pretty cool thing is that this company also makes a special tile that is completely heat resistant and one of them is aimed at soldering so I think the idea is that you put it on top of the ESD mat and he preserves the ESD properties but it allows you to solder and it won't get damaged even as little as this bit so there is a chance I might be able to check it out in the future and if so I'll probably make a video explaining the whole thing and comparing it to the USD man so let's talk about oscilloscopes next which could be pretty expensive but there are more and more options for all sorts of budgets this is exactly the same oscilloscope that I've had in Spain that I've been using for the last five or six years and I absolutely love it it's pretty inexpensive for a full-blown oscilloscope and it runs about 300 which you know it's it's not cheap but their oscilloscopes can get much much more expensive from here but this one I feel that it has all the functionality that I need it has two channels which is great I guess it would be nice to have three or four channels but you pay I think significantly more money for that two is great it has 200 megahertz sampling rate which is more than enough for what I'm doing and just the screen is really large the interface is great it's responsive so I am super happy with this one I forgot to mention earlier that this oscilloscope was donated by circuit specialists here in the US they carry a lot of handtech equipment and they have a great prices so definitely check them out if you're interested in getting something like that a cheaper option is this handheld oscilloscope by handtech as well and this actually doubles as oscilloscope and multimeter so technically you would even get one of those and not get a multimeter and it's definitely cheaper it's about half the price of the other hand tank and the benefits is that it's very portable the downsize is that the screen is definitely smaller so it's a little harder to see things in there I feel that maybe it's a little less responsive and I guess the main drawback is that it only has a 40 megahertz sampling rate which you may think 40 megahertz is plenty for all retro computers but remember that you need you know Nyquist theorem is that you need to sample a signal at least at Double the frequency so with a 40 megahertz sampling rate you would only be able to see a 20 megahertz signal and even so you would really not see much of anything just that there is a signal you cannot see the shape of it or any details at all so in 20 megahertz emails you'll definitely see those in the crystal oscillators for example quite a bit but I just want you to try to do that and if you limit yourself to just main signals in the system itself that are running at you know at most four megahertz or something that will be plenty as well so that is I'm really glad to see that there are options like this that are totally functional and are not quite as expensive as a full oscilloscope this one by the way was also donated by scott.dot so thank you again Scott and finally the least expensive option is this USB oscilloscope this one was actually sent to me by Adrian over at Adrian's digital basement thanks Adrian and the main difference with this one so this one's about half the price of the handheld and the main difference is that it doesn't have a screen so you need to use it with a computer that is a little bit more cumbersome although it has some advantages like maybe easier recording of the traces and things like that it also has two channels so that's really cool I believe they'll use the same kind of Pros and um the other drawback is that this one is rated at 20 megahertz sampling so yeah you're much more limited now than on the other ones but again as long as you know that and you don't expect to get really good accurate clock signals for example you're probably fine for most of the other signals in the system so as long as you know those limitations this is a great budget option now we're getting towards more optional tools like this desoldering station or desoldering gun you'll hear them call sometimes and even though it's optional I have to say that this one transformed the way I worked now this hotter in a chip with 28 or 40 pins it could just take five minutes or less so it actually changed the way I would diagnose some boards before maybe I would have to come up with a some convoluted tests to make sure that that chip was really really faulty because I didn't want to Decatur it otherwise with this it makes it like well it's likely so we might as well decelerate in worst case we make it put it into a socket and the board is better than it was before so it is an amazing tool it's about a hundred dollars so it's not super cheap but if you're going to be doing a lot of the same repairs that I do I would highly recommend this one and related to that is a hot air station this is a pretty inexpensive tool I think it's maybe it's only like 15 or 20 but it can be very handy for especially SMD desoldering and maybe even SMD soldering or although I haven't used that very much the key things that you want in here is to be able to control both the temperature with this and the airflow there are some super cheap models that I guess you can only change the temperature and it's always blowing a lot of air and for example that is not something that you want with when you're soldering something you don't want to blow the components you want them to stay in place and get hot so this is very inexpensive but it will come in handy a fair amount of the time depending on what you do you may or may not need a bench power supply but it can come in really handy a bench power supply is going to allow you to set a particular voltage and a maximum current and it's going to keep that very steady one really nice feature is that if the circuit you're powering ever tries to draw more current than that it will shut off or at least you can tell it to do that which is a trick that has saved me a lot of or saved a lot of boards from burning up another very handy thing is that you can usually see how much current is being drawn so often I will connect a computer and right away say oh there is a short somewhere because this is drawing more currents than it normally does when it's functioning correctly this is a higher end model that what I've had in the past um you actually get three outputs which is great but not necessary if you have something inexpensive I recommend well first of all one that is not going to burn your house down so that that's the most important thing and then a single output is fine but the one thing I would look for is a programmable settings so that way you can have presets and so if I'm going to connect a ZX Spectrum I know it's number one and in amstrad CPC is number two and it you know sets nine volts or five volts or whatever actually with the Spectrum you need to remember to reverse the polarity but that's on you so yeah this is going to be very very useful the last set of tools I want to talk about are magnification tools if you're only doing through-hole components and older computers you may not need any of this at all but as you're doing SMD components more modern architectures or maybe your eyesight starts to fail a little bit the magnification tools can be really helpful actually even for through-hole components they may help you find some cracks and different tracks or check out if a solder joint is cracked or not so even at that level they could be useful as well the simplest possible tool will be some kind of magnifying glass like the one that comes Incorporated here with the light that will be very useful but you can also buy magnifying glasses separately these are not very expensive at all these are maybe 15 and you have a variety of lenses that you can put in there for more or less magnification and they have a light in here I actually have a review of these in an earlier video that I made a few years ago for digital microscopes there are many options and you can get very very expensive and very cheap this particular one was provided by andon Starr my digital microscope and I've used one similar to this before and they are just amazing you can get really close in and see very closely the different joints in SMB components you would have no problem soldering things here or you know finding some problems here so for inspection and soldering of very small pieces these are great the screen quality in this particular one too is amazing and it can record a really high resolution so I'm definitely going to be using this in the future in any kind of SMD projects that I make this particular one also comes with different lenses which allow you to get even closer to this but I think this one is enough for most of the projects that I'm going to be doing this particular lens and then store also has a slightly lower end model with just a single lens that I've used in the past and that was great as well and then there are other cheaper ones that you know they're okay but you start getting you know not great image quality and whatnot but you're still seeing things close up and it helps a lot so there's a lot of range to choose from these are just some of the options and actually one really useful quote-unquote tool that I totally forgot to mention before is you need some kind of TV or monitor display preferably something that takes a variety of input puts if you're going to be working with computers like I'm working so this one is great because I picked it off Craigslist I think for like ten dollars or fifteen dollars and it has everything from RF to composite to HDMI to S video so you can plug in almost anything here which is great it's inexpensive and is very small so I can just put it up in there and have it next to the workbench and I will be using it all the time the other thing that I also didn't mention is you probably want to have access to some kind of computer a very inexpensive laptop will do unfortunately chances are it's better that it's a Windows laptop because if you're going to be using Ebron programmers and things like that a lot of times that software only comes from Windows unfortunately but you can just get a very inexpensive 100 200 laptop and it's also really good for checking out schematics for things that you're working on and having it in your bias a reference so definitely another recommended tool for the lab so there you go these are what I think are the essential tools for an Electronics lab so did I miss any that for you are even more essential than these if so let me know in the comments I'd love to find out about it maybe it's a tool that I don't know or I'm not appreciating enough and I always love to learn about new tools also if there's any of them that interest you in particular let me know and I can make a full video reviewing it against other similar tools or something I'd be happy to do that you know interleaved with some of the repair videos and some of my other projects that are coming up so I hope you enjoyed this video how I set things up now I'm finally set up to start doing my own projects again and repairs so I will see you next time if you enjoyed this video please consider supporting noelle's retro lab on patreon for joining the membership on YouTube not only is that the best way to support this Channel and allow me to continue making more videos but you also get some extra perks like Early Access ad free videos and more thank you again to all the supporters see you next time

Channel: Noel's Retro Lab

Views: 292,482

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Id: dR8nqJzrnSg

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022