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<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Jay S.<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/9/2020 3:49 PM, Peter Pearson
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CA+qbVc_tdyFQM1s3gyV=y9OSTR6A9D8Tn_4ByLpFRSYJDim=7Q@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
<br>
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