It’s holiday time so
I have put together a sample of things that made my Christmas list this year.
Given the theme of this blog, all the items are in some way related to hobby
electronics. In my noob days I often looked through personal blogs to
find out what kind of equipment they owned for doing electronics work. For any
aspiring DIYers out there, I hope my list gives you some new places to go for
test gear and inspiration.
I first found out
about this microscope from the YouTube video review posted on the website (all
items are hyperlinked to their online purchasing sites). It lets you get close
up images and video of circuit components and solder connections with minimum
hassle. I have a standard microscope that I have used a few times for checking
solder bridges on smaller components, but getting a compatible camera will cost
around $150. This one seems to do the job just fine and I can use it for blog
photos. Win, win.
This is a relatively
cheap ($153) function generator from Instek that is capable of generating sine,
square, and triangle waves. The triangle wave function is limited to 1MHz, but the
sine wave and square wave functions can go as high as 3MHz with a peak-to-peak
voltage of 10V at 1% resolution. This particular piece of equipment generates
the waveforms digitally, which means with a high enough sampling rate you
should be able to see the step changes in the output waveforms on an oscilloscope. If
I can get my hands on this it will make demos far easier in addition to adding
some firepower to my test equipment arsenal for doing filter testing. 
A friend/artist once
told me that LEDs were my medium considering my tendency to do LED-centric
projects. Admittedly, I do think of LED projects before anything else,
but that is mostly because they can be appreciated by anyone regardless of background. This meter is not something I consider
essential to any home workbench, but I do like experimenting with LEDs and have
plans to do some custom lighting designs in the future. I think this meter
could help me out. I also want to test batches of LEDs for brightness using a
standard test current to see if I get a Gaussian curve similar to Dave Jones’s recent resistor tests.
You might remember
that I did a whole breakdown on my new BK Precision 2709B Multimeter a few
months back. So why would I want another multimeter? Well the simple answer is
that you can never have too many multimeters. The reality is that I would like
to be able to measure input voltage and current as well as output voltage and
current on certain power electronics to test for efficiency. I could do this
with two meters by switching the connections, but ultimately I would like to
get four meters so I won’t have to put in the effort. Plus, this meter is only
about $60 and won Dave Jones’s $50 multimeter shootout.
My recent failure with my
Halloween project pointed out to me how little I actually understand about
wireless communication. From what I have read online Zigbee is a good protocol to
start with if you are trying to learn wireless data transfer. They are a bit on
the expensive side so I haven’t had the nerve to buy them for myself. Look for
some blog entries on my experiments with these radios if they find their way
into my lab. 
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