If you’ve decided to start learning electronics and you’re looking to set up your own hobbyist electronics lab, you’re in the right place. This guide will help you learn how to set up an electronics lab and find the right tools and equipment.
This list contains a lot of different tools. You don’t need to buy them all at once. Otherwise, you’ll end up buying stuff that you don’t need or stuff you’ll never use! Start by purchasing a few essential tools related to the projects you want to do. Then, as your lab, and your expertise starts growing, upgrade you lab with new tools.
Finding the Right Spot
Making electronics projects is a lot of fun and it is nice to have a specific space to be our lab, a space where we have all we need to make our projects. It doesn’t have to be a full room or a big space. But it’s important to have “the” space! A space that is ours and where we can have all things we need to get the most of making electronics projects.
Once you have your spot, you need to set it up! We’ll show you some essential tools to set up your own electronics lab.
Multimeter
A multimeter is a measurement tool absolutely necessary. It helps you troubleshooting your circuits. Sometimes your circuits may not work because of faulty wires. Checking the connections with the multimeter can save a lot of time.
Soldering Station
Having a soldering station in an electronics lab is absolutely necessary, even if you don’t usually build permanent circuits. Many electronics components don’t come with header pins or breadboard-friendly pins attached. In these cases, you’ll need to do some soldering work. If you don’t do a lot of soldering, a simple soldering station will do the job. However, we really recommend getting a good soldering station with enough wattage and adjustable temperature. A good soldering station will last your entire life.
Soldering Accessories
Besides the soldering station you also need some soldering accessories:
- Soldering Iron: the easiest type to work with is 60/40 lead/tin.
- Solder wick: the wick soaks up molten solder, it’s useful to clean the excess of solder.
- Cleaning Sponge : to clean the tip of your iron while soldering.
- Tip tinner: used to clean the tip of the soldering iron.
- Diagonal cutting pliers: useful to trim the leads after soldering.
- Helping Hnd: to hold your components together while you solder.
- Flux open: the flux pen content aids the flowing of a lead-free solder.
- Soldering Pump: this tool helps you removing the solder left when desoldering components.
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