[sdiy] Starting Point?

[Jay Schwichtenberg]

If you are serious about DIY electronics just buy decent tools and it 
will make your electronics life much more pleasurable. Probably over 
time if you stick it out look at spending about $1000.

Agreed getting a good temp controlled soldering iron, proper tips and 
solder are a good start. A lot depends on what type of soldering you do 
(SMT, thru hole, power devices) as far as tips and solder type/size. I 
might use 2-3 soldering tips and 2 or 3 types of solder for a project. 
Look up water soluble and no clean flux and use solder that has them. I 
use 0.015" diameter solder for SMT and either 0.02 or 0.03 diameter 
solder for thru hole.

Start out with just some basic tools. Good needle nose pliers, cutters, 
wire stripper, lead bender, small screw drivers. If you do SMT then some 
good tweezers will be needed.

If you are serious get a real good DVM if not so serious get a decent 
one. I've been into electronics a long time (hobby and for work) and to 
me a good DVM is a must and is the most expensive piece of test gear I have.

Over time if you are still into electronics get an oscilloscope and 
decent bench power supply too. Get an OK digital oscilloscope, not some 
cheap, used analog scope and learn how to use it. The RIgol 1054 types 
of scopes are about $350 and while not the best they are a great value 
and can get the job done. Big advantage with a digital scope are having 
measurements, decent timing, triggering, acquisition buffer and serial 
bus decode (SPI, I2C) if you get into uC stuff.

Jay S.

On 10/9/2020 3:49 PM, Peter Pearson wrote:
> Thinking about this more, if I had one piece of advice to give to 
> teenage me, it would be to buy a proper soldering station like a Hakko 
> 936 or similar (used are pretty cheap!) with a chisel tip.  If I could 
> go back and do my first projects with a station that could actually 
> solder instead of a plug straight in the wall radioshack iron I think 
> I would've made a lot of progress a lot faster.  I'm sure my soldering 
> was bad at the start but a garbage soldering iron was a big roadblock 
> and made me think I was never going to learn.
>
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