Anyone who works with electronics will eventually find themselves with a glut of little components, PCBs and parts lying around. It’s tempting to just keep them in the original bags, let them form a pile in the corner of the bench, and pray that the angle of repose will hold as you add more and more to the top. Then, when you least expect it: AVALANCHE! — and you come to the realization that there’s gotta be a better way.
Fortunately, we stand on the shoulders of giants. One of those giants invented something called the drawer. Other giants invented plastics, and then injection molding, and so the solution to your problem is now easy and inexpensive.
These drawer cabinets from Akro-Mils are the real deal. Made from sturdy ABS plastic right here in the USA. There are similar, cheaper units, that you can get from Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, etc., but they are not the same. The cheap ones are flimsy, they warp in summer heat, and tend to tip over because they have no mass. I started out with the units from Lowe’s, but after they fell over (probably from shame) for the like the 3rd time and scattered resistors all over the floor, I got fed up and bought the Akro-Mils units.
The cabinet on the left is 64 small drawers about 4″ deep, perfect for holding resistors, capacitors, ICs and the like. The one on the right has 32 of those same drawers on the top, but the bottom has 12 larger drawers which are great for holding PCBs, unassembled kits, beefy heatsinks, etc.
We’ve addeda new category to the partfinder called “Workbench”, and pages under that for storage and tools, so you can find all the stuff you need to set up your own home electronics workbench. Many of the tools are available from our shop as well, and each one of these has Ladyada’s seal of approval. We’re still in the process of adding stuff, but keep an eye on these pages for great ways to equip your home setup.
NEW PRODUCT – USB Microscope – 5.0 Megapixel / 220x magnification / 8 LEDs. As electronics get smaller and smaller, you’ll need a hand examining PCBs and this little USB microscope is the perfect tool. Its smaller and lighter than a large optical microscope but packs quite a bit of power in its little body. There’s a 5.0 megapixel sensor inside and an optical magnifier that can adjust from 20x (for basic PCB inspection) to 220x (for detailed inspection). Eight white LEDs are angled right onto whatever you’re examining so you get enough lighting to see, and are smoothly adjustable via a dial on the side.
New! We’ve upgraded from the previous model we stocked, this is a microscope to 5.0 Megapixel (from 2.0M) and this one comes with two removable plastic caps to get close ups for a wider focusing range.
If you plug this into any computer, it just shows up as a standard USB camera (we used this for our weekly Ask an Engineer show) and the Windows/Mac software lets you take snapshots using the button on the side of the microscope or direct from the software (so you don’t move the camera).
We tried a bunch of different USB microscopes and found this one to be the best combination of optical clarity, usability, and price. It’s perfect for electronics hacking, rework, SMT (de)soldering, inspection, and soon you’ll find yourself pulling it out to look and photograph all sort of cool small stuff around your lab and home.
NEW PRODUCT – Pocket Autoranging Digital Multimeter. When we’re on the go, we like to keep a multimeter in our purse and this model is by far the best pocket meter we’ve found. It’s so good you’ll end up using it as your main multimeter!
First up, this meter can measure nearly everything: it’s got DC and AC voltage, resistance, diode, and beeping continuity test, capacitance, frequency, and current (both AC and DC in micro-Ampere and milli-Amp ranges.) There’s also an alkaline battery test – essentially a fixed range voltage test with a bigger drain to get a realistic load reading not just a floating voltage reading.
And that’s not all! It’s also auto-ranging, has a data-hold button and turns itself off automatically after about 15 minutes to preserve the battery life. There’s a removable fuse inside for the current sensing side – cheaper meters have the fuse soldered in.
Our favorite part is the nice hard-shell case which will protect the meter and will remind you to turn it off (it won’t close properly if the switch isn’t in the off position) and a smart cord-wrapping area to keep the leads from unwrapping and poking holes in stuff. Runs on two 1.5V alkaline coin cells, of the very common LR44 variety – some cheaper meters use rare 12V cells that are hard to find. Comes with one set of batteries pre-installed. This is a really nice pocket multimeter!
I wish I had one of these, it’d be great for video! Instructables user cold_steel writes:
This is probably one of the most used tools in my workshop, the “extra hands”. It is the ultimate tool for soldering and prying in the very small range. But over time I found that I do not have enough light on my work when using this tool. Actually all the benefits you would expect from having a magnifying glass for easy reach are over shadowed by the shadow cast by the rim. And honestly I haven’t managed to position my desk lamp in such a way that I was able to conveniently light my tiny work. So I decided it is time for some upgrades.
As usual you will find all G-code and other files included so you can reproduce this easy on your own CNC machine.
NEW PRODUCT! 65 Piece Ratchet Screwdriver and Tool Bit Set – Look, over there at that thing! Take it apart! You can now attack just about every kind of box or enclosure that needs undoing with this ratchet screwdriver set. This set is fine quality and excels at disassembling and assembling larger hardware and makes a good companion to our smaller 38-piece set.
What drew us to this tool box is its comprehensive selection of bits, the two rubber screwdriver handles (one small and one large, neither are thin or slippery), that the large screwdriver has a built in ratchet, the magnetic bit holder (which is not hollow so you don’t have to get annoyed when bits fall through into the handle, tough CR-V alloy steel bits, and the very nice box to hold it all! Each bit is also stamped with the name/size. Both handles come with an extension so you can get into nooks & crannies.
Hot on the heels of his outstanding Composite Video on a Scope hack, Alan Wolke shares some fundamental tips on measuring the frequency of a signal using an analog scope. This is of interest to beginner digital scope users too: it’s easy to assume that the frequency figure given by your DSO is accurate, but there are lots of reasons why it can be off. There may also be times that you want to measure the frequency of a signal riding on top of another, more prominent signal, so this is a valuable skill to have.
NEW PRODUCT – 38 piece screwdriver set! Look, over there at that thing! Take it apart! You can now attack just about every kind of box or enclosure that needs undoing with this 38-bit screwdriver set. This set is fine quality and excels at disassembling games, phones, cameras, and other small portable electronic goodies.
What drew us to this tool box is its small compact size, the big grippy rubber handle (not a thin or slippery metal grip), the magnetic bit holder (which is not hollow so you don’t have to get annoyed when bits fall through into the handle, tough CR-V alloy steel bits, the very nice box to hold it all and of course the fine selection of bits!
Each bit is also stamped with the name/size. Also comes with a 60mm extension so you can get into nooks & crannies.
Interesting editorial by Michael Dunn over at ScopeJunction:
You know what? I can buy an entire oscilloscope (USB module or standalone) — one that includes serial decodes and FFT — for less than the cost of one of those software options on many higher-end units! Does that seem reasonable?
I’m sorry, but FFT just isn’t that big a deal any more. Free code has been floating about for decades, and it isn’t suddenly worth $1,000, just because it’s running on a scope. That just makes customers feel taken advantage of.
Similar story for simple serial decodes. I won’t repeat myself.
Is there a downside to my feature comforts? Well, some pretty sophisticated entry-level scopes are now available at nice price points. You can probably end up doubling their cost by loading up on features. Would making more of those features standard raise the price of entry? Maybe. But, as I implied above, getting a second, lower-end scope with those features as standard would give you two scopes for less than the price of one.
Personally, I’m inclined to agree with him, especially about the serial options. Many of the serial options mentioned in the poll are native to $2 microcontrollers, and none are particularly fast (except I2S, sometimes), so why do the software-only upgrades cost so much?
In recent years, 3D rapid prototyping machines have gone mainstream. And we’ve been excited to see 3D printers spreading beyond businesses to individuals, with the aid of a little DIY ingenuity (e.g., Makerbots, RepRap, etc.). All these machines work on the same principal – to create a form, they split a volume into thin slices, and build up the form by printing a layer of material and bonding it to the next. The main difference between the build technologies (SLA, SLS, FDM and others) is the material and the bonding methods.
But there are times when we need to output lines in space rather than volumes. Most 3D printing technologies are not well suited for printing thin lines because the materials are weak, the machine uses a lot of 3D-print support material, and the process is slow. The closest thing to a machine that can output lines is a CNC wire bender, but these machines are used almost exclusively for mass production in factories. They are not used for rapid prototyping because the equipment is large, expensive and takes trained personnel to run. So, we decided to make the DIWire Bender.
The DIWire Bender is a rapid prototype machine that bends metal wire to produce 2D or 3D shapes.
Starting off as a hobbyist or even small tech company designing and building electronics you will soon learn that most of the fun IC or MCU chips are either cheaper in, or only available in, surface mount form, and fancy reflow ovens are expensive. But a soldering oven isnt much different from a toaster oven– the only difference is the accuracy and temperature settings.
That is why Im going to show you how to build your very own Soldering Reflow Oven for under $100 from an old/new standard toaster oven, thermocouple and a microcontroller.
Papercrafts at Adafruit! We’re excited to share this Resistor Helper you can download and make yourself. It’s the newest tool in our Circuit Playground family– when you can’t get to your iPhone or iPad, use paper! One side helps you read 4-band types and the other side takes care of 5-band types. The Resistor Helper is on Thingiverse as a PDF (with Illustrator editability preserved). Designed by Adafruit with Matthew Borgatti. You can also grab the PDF on github.
Last quarter I decided that I needed a good universal counter for a few of the projects I had in mind for this summer. A universal counter contains a high quality time reference, which it uses to measure and count external events for you. The simplest example is to count frequency; the universal counter resets a counter, waits a second, and then saves the value counted up to. This count would be the number of cycles in one second, commonly refereed to as Hertz. There are numerous other function available on these, including measuring the period of a signal (which is the inverse of Hertz), measuring the interval between two events on different signals, or the ratio between two different frequencies.
Need to take a microscope outside? We tried and liked this USB scope from Adafruit, but needed an inverted microscope for a portable project so we laser cut an acrylic table for it. Here are the plans in pdf format. The back and sides are 5 inches across, cut from 1/4 inch thick clear acrylic, the top is 1/16″ (thin so you can still focus 200x on your items) and the nuts and bolts are 6-32 nylon. We had some Mcmaster nylon parts already: 94812A113 (nuts) and 94609A153 (bolts, were a bit long but easy to cut to length)
USB Microscope – 2.0 Megapixel / 200x magnification / 8 LEDs. As electronics get smaller and smaller, you’ll need a hand examining PCBs and this little USB microscope is the perfect tool. Its smaller and lighter than a large optical microscope but packs quite a bit of power in its little body. There’s a 2.0 megapixel sensor inside and an optical magnifier that can adjust from 20x (for basic PCB inspection) to 200x (for detailed inspection). Eight white LEDs are angled right onto whatever you’re examining so you get enough lighting to see, and are smoothly adjustable via a dial on the side.
If you plug this into any computer, it just shows up as a standard USB camera (we used this for our weekly Ask an Engineer show) and the Windows/Mac software lets you take snapshots using the button on the side of the microscope or direct from the software (so you don’t move the camera).
We tried a bunch of different USB microscopes and found this one to be the best combination of optical clarity, usability, and price. It’s perfect for electronics hacking, rework, SMT (de)soldering, inspection, and soon you’ll find yourself pulling it out to look and photograph all sort of cool small stuff around your lab and home.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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