Tools you NEED to get into electronics (and QuadHands giveaway!)

hey guys I've got some stuff that I want to show you today but first let me get this out of the way hey guys alright so up until this point every one of my videos has just been my hands but I wanted to be able to do more kinds of videos for you guys more frequently so we're gonna change things up a little bit finally got some decent equipment for this kind of thing and I spent the last few weeks basically redoing my whole work room just for you guys you want to see it [Music] [Music] I'm pretty excited about that part and yeah this should open things up a little bit and make it so that I can do more kinds of videos for you guys that I haven't really been able to do before like today's video one of the questions that I get asked most frequently is what equipment do I use when I make stuff and what would I recommend for somebody getting into electronics or 3d printing so I'm gonna divide this up into two videos this one is gonna be about my soldering setup and tools and accessories that I recommend for anybody getting into electronics and then the next one hopefully in a week or two will be about my 3d printers things that I like and don't like about each one of them in that kind of stuff and like it says in the title Amanda over at quad ends has been really generous she's given me two sets of their helping hands to give away to you guys they make some of the nicest and most sturdy helping hands that I've ever used so I'm really excited to give those away and a big THANK YOU to them for that so here in a few minutes I'll show those to you guys and I'll tell you how you can win one all right now before I start you can probably tell I don't sound very good right after I started making this video I came down with the cold but even though I sound terrible I feel a lot better so we're gonna keep going also all the tools and accessories that I'm going to show you today there should be an amazon link in the description alright so if you're just getting into electronics then it won't be very long before you're gonna find yourself needing a soldering iron I always see at least a couple people in the comments asking if there's any way to do the projects that I'm showing without soldering and it's true that you can do a lot of cool stuff and some prototyping with breadboards but you're gonna hit a wall pretty quickly if you ever want to put that inside of a case and have a nice finished end product like a gameboy zero or something else in fact even the nicest most plug-and-play all-in-one boards for the Game Boy zero like kites latest board which by the way I'll have a video for that soon so keep an eye out for that they still require a little bit of soldering so here are two features that you absolutely need to make sure that you get when you go to buy a soldering iron the first is adjustable temperature depending on what kind of components you're working with how fragile they are and what type of solder you're using you're going to want to be able to turn the temperature up and down in different situations a lot of the really cheap ones don't have this they'll just have a wattage specified on them and the soldering iron is just kind of stuck at the temperature that it heats up to the other feature is interchangeable tips the tip of your soldering iron is going to wear out eventually either sooner or later depending on how well you take care of it and you're doing with it additionally just like with adjusting the temperature it can be really nice to be able to change out the size and shape of your soldering iron tip depending on what you're working on so you can go anywhere from a few dollars all the way up to a few hundred dollars on a soldering iron I don't necessarily recommend going to either extreme and there are several popular brands out there that tend to have both those features on most of their soldering irons two big ones are Jaco and Weller they tend to be a little bit on the pricier side but they also tend to have a lot of nicer features that the cheaper ones don't have like automatic shutoff and some other things like that alright so with all that said this is the soldering station that I've been using for the last year and a half or so I've been really happy with it and I know that a few other people on the forums have been using it as well it has the two features that I mentioned on it and the tips are actually compatible with Jaco brand tips but it also has this hot air rework gun attached to it which I didn't think that I'd use very much but I use this thing all the time it's especially handy for stripping down raspberry pi's so like removing the USB port HDMI port stuff like that make it smaller so that it can fit inside projects easier if you get it for between fifty and sixty dollars so not bad at all and you get a lot of bang for your buck okay so you might be wondering why I didn't put something like a multimeter at number two but if you don't have something to hold whatever you're soldering while you're working on it you're gonna have a bad time so number two is a set of helping hands and like everything else you can go really cheap or kind of expensive but in this case if you're just getting into the Hobby you don't want to spend a lot of money there's not a lot of risk and going really cheap in fact this is a set that I use for a number of years I use it in several of the first videos that I did it's not very sturdy it feels pretty cheap but it is pretty cheap and it'll actually get you pretty far if you're trying to save some money a step up from that is these guys from hobby Creek I've been using these for about the last year or so and it's a pretty big step up in terms of quality they're much more flexible and easier to adjust I like the clips a lot better as well they have these nice silicone tips on them that won't melt if you're soldering something right next to them you can get it for like 18 bucks it doesn't have a base on it but it does have a really strong magnet so for a couple of bucks you can go to Walmart and get a two and a half pound weight and it sticks really well to it and it's nice and sturdy so the whole setup is under 20 bucks a pretty big step up from both of those is this set from quad heads I showed this in one of my recent videos and it's really grown on me sure about it at first but the more I used it the more I appreciated how sturdy it is it's got this really thick base it's like a quarter of an inch thick and then it's got these huge rubber feet on it it's just ridiculous the arms are nice and sturdy in fact even just to get them to rotate you have to sort of unlock them rotate them and then lock them into place so even if you're working with something heavy it's gonna stay exactly where you put it it goes for about forty five dollars but you really do get what you pay for you can get some accessories for it as well like the soldering iron tip cleaner which has magnet on the bottom of it that sticks to the base of the quad edge I like that so like I mentioned in the beginning of the video I have two sets of these to give away so check out the description there will be a link to a blog post you should be able to enter to win on there I'll leave entries open until the end of the month that's when I'm hoping that my next video up so if you watch this after that sorry you missed it but be sure and subscribe and hit that notification button because I'm gonna be doing a lot more of these types of giveaways here in the future this next one kind of goes along with the helping hand so I'll go ahead and get it out of the way and that is the surface that you're working on unless you're working on just like a really old beat-up table that you don't care about at all you're probably going to want to have some kind of mat underneath whatever you're working on my sound kind of obvious but what to look for might not be so obvious so I tried several different materials and by far the best kind of mat that I have found to use is a silicone mat there's a couple of reasons for that for one it's incredibly resistant to heat so if you get your soldering iron tip too close to it or a hot air gun or even if you drip some molten solder on it it's not gonna damage it and it's gonna protect the table underneath the other reason is that virtually nothing will stick to this I mean pretty much you name it paint glue even molten solder once it hardens or dries you can pretty much just peel it right off and then you can wipe it down with some alcohol and it looks brand new a lot of them also have some pockets up at the top to hold screws for whatever you're working on and some of those even have a magnetic strip behind them to hold the screws in place so yeah these kinds of mats are just awesome alright so sort of the last bigger item that I'd recommend getting right off the bat is a multimeter now believe it or not this is actually something that you can get away with using a cheaper one and it'll get you pretty far in fact I used a dirt cheap one for a number of years before upgrading recently I'll tell you why I upgraded you in just a minute but the things that you'll be using it for are measuring voltage current resistance and checking continuity and continuity is just a fancy way of checking the two points on the board or that two wires are directly connected so you can use that to check and make sure that all of the solder joints that you created are nice and solid and pretty much any of them will be able to do those things for you but the two things that I would recommend looking for when you're getting ones are beeping on continuity check which means that the multimeter just beeps whenever you find continuity between two points that was actually the whole reason that I upgraded recently because you can check continuity by setting your multimeter to resistance and then checking between two points and when you see the resistance drop to zero you know that you found continuity that's how I've been doing it for years and it works just fine but it can be kind of annoying for some situations because you have to position the probes and then you have to keep an eye on the screen to watch the resistance value could just be kind of a pain to do so that's definitely a feature that I'd look for the other feature is automatic scaling of the voltage that's displayed on the screen a lot of the cheaper ones were required that you actually turn the knob to different positions depending on what voltage range you're going to measure one like this one does that for you automatically so it's just one less thing to worry about okay so that's it for the really big things that I would recommend getting right off the bat if you're getting into electronics now we'll go through a few other smaller things that are still really nice to have on hand so it's pretty much a guarantee that at some point you're gonna need to remove solder from whatever you're working on whether it be because you accidentally connected to things that you shouldn't have maybe you dripped some solder on to it while you were working on something or maybe you're removing components and you just want to remove the excess solder that's leftover whatever the reason is it's gonna happen and that's where these come in this is a solder sucker and you may have seen me use it in some previous videos the way that it works is you heat up the solder that you're trying to remove you push the plunger in put the tip next to the solder and push the button pretty simple it's especially nice for uneven surfaces like maybe a board with a lot of components on it and you just need to remove a blob of solder from somewhere this is really good for that now if you're trying to completely remove all the excess solder from a surface this will get you about 80% of the way there to get it completely clean that's where this comes in this is a desoldering braid and again you may have seen me use it in the previous it's basically just a stranded braid of copper wire so you can press this up against whatever solder you're trying to remove heat it up and it will wake that solder up into itself this is nice for removing virtually all of the excess solder from the surface in fact in the VM you build that I did recently you look carefully you can see that I dripped some solder on to some of the button contacts this is what I use to remove that solder and make it a nice smooth surface so you can't tell that it ever happened when you're pushing the buttons so next a couple of things to help you take care of the tip of your soldering iron as you're using it you'll need to clean the tip of your soldering iron periodically as it accumulates some excess solder maybe some burnt flux and things like that so the best thing for doing that is one of these that I showed earlier these are nice because you just kind of stick the tip in there and wiggle it around and it cleans all that off for you nice and simple some people just use a wet sponge which does the job but the problem with that is that it will cool down the tip of your soldering iron and it'll have to reheat a little bit after you clean it off every time it's not a huge deal but I've also heard some people say that that can decrease the life of your tip because it's constantly heating up cooling down and going through that cycle while you're using it I don't know how true that is but these things work way better anyway and then another thing to take care of it is tinning the tip of your soldering iron that basically just means putting a very thin layer of solder across the whole tip so that can make it a lot easier to work with it but it can also make it last a lot longer if you remember to do that every time that you're done using it you don't need anything special to do this per se do a lot of good videos out there for how to do that but if you're lazy like I am this stuff is fantastic just like with this you just kind of stick it in there and it'll tin it for you nice and easy and then the last one might kind of surprise you because it might have sounded like I was putting it down a little bit earlier but one thing that's really handy to have on hand is a red board it's basically just a grid of connected columns and rows of pin holes so if you're prototyping something if you're trying to figure out how something is going to be arranged you can do it on a breadboard first before you make it permanent with solder this is also one of the best ways to just start tinkering around with Arduino and Raspberry Pi and making them interact with things like buttons and le so really handy to have a couple of these on hand alright guys well I think that about does it like I said this video is more geared towards people just getting into this hobby so if that's you then I hope this helps you get started and if that's not you then thanks for watching anyway I'd love to hear what you guys think in the comments is there anything that I missed are there tools and accessories that you definitely recommend people get right off the bat also let me know if there are any videos or tutorials or projects that you'd like to see me tackle be sure to visit the link in the description where you can enter to win a set of quad hands and again a big thank you to them for making that happen next time I'll be telling you guys about my 3d printers and giving you guys some tips and things that you can look for when you're going to buy one I've also got a bunch of projects lined up including a build with kites latest boards so stay tuned for that and I'll see you next time

Channel: wermy

Views: 116,316

Keywords: sudomod, wermy, electronics, arduino, raspberry pi, maker, diy, circuits, soldering

Id: 6oVU8yCeYU4

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018