Electronics Workbench 5.12 Pro
This course is designed to help you setup your own electronics lab.If you are starting your adventures in electronics, and you are not looking to setup a professional electronics lab, then this course is perfect for you.A lab is a place at your home that you have specifically organised in a way that promotes your enjoyment of working with electronics.It is where your tools, components and instruments are.It is where you do your circuit experiments and the bulk of your learning.There are significant differences between professional and hobbyist electronics labs. The tools and components I discussed in this section make up the core of your electronics lab kit.Storage is also important.
Please think carefully about how to organise your lab so that your work is efficient. Reduce the time wasted in searching for parts that you know you already have.Overall, you don't need too many things. All of this kit can easily fit in part of a small bookcase.As far as the tools are concerned, try to buy premium whenever possible. They will last longer (practically, forever), and work better.For the basic electronic parts, show around the Internet for the lowest prices.
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These basic electronic components are commodity items with barely noticeable differences between manufacturers, at least for our hobbyist purposes.In the next section, I will discuss ways to power your project. In this lecture, I will discuss various ways to power your projects with batteries.In particular, I will look at using battery packs for normal alkaline batteries, or rechargeable Nickel Metal Hydride batteries with their charger. These options offer simple ways to power your electronics projects.I will also discuss Lithium Ion batteries, which offer higher energy density than Alkaline or Nickel Metal Hydride batteries, but require more expensive specialised chargers and need more handling care. A bench power supply is an instrument that allows the user to control the precise voltage and current that feeds into a circuit.I don't think that a bench power supply is a necessary equipment for beginner makers, especially when you work with a prototyping platform like the Arduino. It is good to know, though. Next to a multimeter, a bench power supply is probably the next lowest-cost instrument that you can have on your bench, and compared to walled power supplies, it offer more flexibility since it's always on your bench,I discuss bench power supplies in this lecture.
In this section, I discussed several options for providing power to your electronic creations.Old and unused power supplies, and battery packs represent the simplest power options.The you have the option of more expensive but more powerful Lithium Ion with their specialised charger.If you need a power supply that gives you a lot more control on the current and voltage parameters, with useful safety features included, then you can look at benchtop digitally controlled power supplies.In the next section, I will discuss the rotary tool and the hot glue gun. In this lecture, I will show you how to use a hot glue gun. This power tool melts a thermoplastic adhesive that then you apply on a surface.Hot glue guns are used in various applications, like in book-binding, in woodwork and the packaging industry, to name some examples.In electronics, we use the hot glue gun to do things like secure wires or components in place or to provide insulation.In this lecture, I will give you a demonstration on how you can use a hot glue gun to secure wires on a small printed circuit board. In this section, I discuss several examples of test equipment.Apart from entry-level multimeters, test equipment can be fairly expensive, and are sophisticated.Again, apart from an entry level multimeter, I don't recommend that you equip your amateur lab with one of these right away.
It is best to wait until you have an actual need for them. Remember that you can explore many of the concepts of circuit design and theory using software simulators. I believe that simulators are a better option for beginnersI in this section I will first discuss multimeters, which is fact is an essential item on your workbench.
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I will show you two multimeters so you can get an appreciation of the differences between an entry-level model and a more advanced one.In other lectures I will also discuss oscilloscopes and function generators. This is the first of 4 lectures on multimeters.The multimeter is an important test instrument and one that you should have in your lab toolkit. We use multimeters to measure at least voltage, current, resistance and continuity in a circuit.More advanced multimeters offer additional types of measurements.In this first one of the multimeter lectures, I will introduce this essential test instrument and demonstrate the use of a low-cost example that should be in your lab toolkit.In following lectures, I will show you how to use a more high-end multimeter. Autoranging multimeters are instruments that can display a measurement without the user having to select the scale or range of the parameter that they are measuring.The instrument will automatically detect the scale and perform the measurement. Even though auto ranging multimeters operate in a semi-automated way, they offer a lot more functionality than manual multimeters and hence have a higher learning curve because they are more complicated than simple.In this lecture, I discuss auto ranging multimeters and give a demonstration of one of them. The oscilloscope is a sophisticated instrument. At its very core, it measures the voltage over time and displays this as a waveform on a screen.With an oscilloscope, you can see how the voltage in your circuit changes over time.
You can contrast this to a multimeter that only gives you a value for a single moment in time.From this core feature, modern digital oscilloscopes add an impressive array of measuring functionality. By analysing the voltage signal waveform, an oscilloscope can extract the signal's amplitude, rise time, frequency, and time interval, to name just a few. They can even be used to decode digital communications based on protocols like I2C, USB and SPI.In this first lecture on oscilloscopes, I will make an introduction and give a demonstration involving a simple resistor-capacitor circuit.In the next lecture, I will give you a demo on decoding communication between two Arduino. In this lecture, I will show you a more advanced feature of the oscilloscope, decoding.Modern digital oscilloscopes can analyse voltage waveforms that encode communications traffic, and decode it. This way you can probe this communication at the wire level.Although this is not something that a beginner will be worried about, the modern proliferation of microcontrollers and peripherals that implement industry standard communications protocols like I2C, USB and SPI, means that people working with Arduinos, Raspberry Pi's and similar platform will be interested in this type of decoding function, sooner or later.Let's have a look at what this kind of decoding looks like.
In this lecture, I will introduce the function generator.With the function generator, you can create signals with various waveforms with full control over their characteristics. For example, you can create standard sine, square, triangular and sawtooth signals, and control their frequency, amplitude, and phase.You can use these signals to trigger your circuit. For example, if you are building an amplifier, you can use your function generator to create a signal of a particular frequency, shape and amplitude and test whether the amplifier is behaving as you expect under those parameters.A function generator is not a required piece of equipment for the workbench of people that are starting playing with electronics now. However, it is useful to know what these devices are and what they can do, until, at some point, you decide that you need one. In this section, I discussed multimeters, oscilloscopes and function generators. All these are examples of test instruments.A simple multimeter is necessary for your workbench.
The rest are not, as their cost is considerable and.For people, that start their electronics adventures on mostly digital platforms like the Arduino, a basic multimeter is all that you need.If you still wish to play around with an oscilloscope, you can also consider USB-based versions that use your computer's screen as a display. USB oscilloscopes are cheaper than dedicated ones, at the expense of tying down your computer. In the previous lecture I showed you how to remove through-hole components from a PCB, using your soldering iron.As you can appreciate, it wasn't a fun experience, and you may be wondering if there is a better way.Yes, there is!
In this lecture, I'll show you how to desolder though-hole components within seconds and without risk of injury. I will demonstrate how to use a through-hole component desoldering gun.This type of tool can be relatively expensive, and although I do not consider it a requirement for your workbench when you are starting up, it is something I would like you to know about. You will often need to join cables together using solder, be it to extend them or repair them. The job will not be done until you insulate the joint.Electrical tape is a 'quick and dirty' way to provide insulation. If you are looking for something more 'professional', consider heat shrink tubing.Heat shrink tubes are plastic tubes that you can insert at the point of the joint, and then heat with a heat source to make the tube shrink. Once it shrinks and you remove the heat source, the tube will snug around the joint permanently, and keep it protected just like the original, regular insulating jacket.In this lecture, I will show you how to use heat shrink tubes.
Using electronic circuit simulator software is a great way to learn electronics. It is also a great way to test a design in software before trying it out on a breadboard.Circuit simulators allow you to create a circuit in software and set the parameters of each component to any value you like.
This kind of flexibility is something that often we don't have in real life.A simulator is also great to have in the absence of real test instruments, like an oscilloscope or a function generator. A good circuit simulator will include both, also simulated.In this lecture, I will discuss web-based circuit simulators.In the next one, I will do a demonstration of my favourite desktop software simulator, iCircuit. Datasheets contain important information on electronic components. How to connect them to a circuit, the various limits of their operation, their physical characteristics, and more.Datasheets can seem intimidating to new makers. Their tables, charts, diagrams and technical jargon can look incomprehensive.There is some truth to all that, however in this lecture I will show you that datasheets are predictable and very informative. They are worth the effort it takes to read them.Even if you are not fully familiar with the context and technology of the part they describe, you will still be able to extract useful practical information from them.
This was the concluding section of the course.I covered issues around safety and described the structure of datasheets.Basic safety precautions will protect your components from damage. Based on my experience, simply using an antistatic mat and a grounding bracelet will do such damage extremely rare. I don't remember ever having damaged any static-sensitive components.Reading datasheets becomes easier with time both because you start recognising the common organisation that most datasheets share and because your expertise around the technologies that they cover increases.Do not despair if the first few datasheets that you picked up make no sense: you have just entered a world with its own jargon. Congratulations on completing The Electronics Workbench: a Lab Setup Guide!I hope that this course has given you some ideas on how to setup your own electronics lab at home, and that it has helped you to distinguish between what is important to have in it and what is nice to have.An electronics lab is always changing to match your interests, but it's core components stay the same. Getting the basics right will ensure that your investment in money and effort will pay off for the long term.I tried to cover all the topics that I believe are important to most people. If there is something that you wished I had covered, please feel free to ask me by posting a question in the course forum.
Similarly, if you think I could have done things differently, post a message and explain!If you already have a home electronics lab, I would be very interested to know the details, and I'm sure that other students in this course would be too!Post a picture with a short description, and tell us about your favourite equipment!Until next time, happy making!