A Solderpunk once more
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The bare minimum equipment you need to be an effective electronics hobbyist
(well, beyond generic tools like screwdrivers, pliers, wire cutters etc. which I
assume even non-electronics folk have) in my opinion is a digital multimeter and
a soldering iron. When I left New Zealand, I left both behind, so for the past
four months I haven't really deserved my handle of "solderpunk". But as of
recently, I have both again.
The multimeter I left behind was a truly pitiful thing. I bought it many, many
years ago for a basic electrical project where I was using some buttons, some
relays and a long cable to turn some things on and off from far away. This was
the first time I'd done anything remotely like this since I built kits with my
Dad, so I had zero tools for it. I wanted a multimeter basically to use only as
a continuity tester to make sure that I'd wired things up right. So I bought
literally the cheapest meter that was available from the place I was ordering
the relays and buttons from. It had the brand name "standard", and was about as
unremarkable as a multimeter could be. I suppose perhaps it may not have been
quite the cheapest, it did have a transitor testing function, but it was surely
nothing to think about twice.
Between leaving NZ and moving to Finland, I stayed in Australia for a few weeks
to catch up with friends and family. My plan in leaving the multimeter behind
was that while in Aus I'd buy the EEVblog-branded edition of the Brymen BM235
meter (
https://www.eevblog.com/product/bm235-multimeter/). Dave Jones can be a
little over the top at times (although I am generally a fan), but he surely
knows what he is talking about, and says of the BM235 "it's a beaut little
meter, one of the safest and well built meters in a small form factor". The
meter was on special at the time for a good price, and I figured if I ordered it
as soon as I got home it would surely arrive before I left for Finland and all
would be well.
Murphy's law kicked right in and when I went to place the order, they were all
out of stock, so I ended up in Finland meterless. After checking out the
locally available options, I ended up ordering an Amprobe AM-510 off Amazon.de
for 60 Euro or thereabouts. This is not exactly expensive as far as meters go,
but in general I'm a bit of a scrooge and tend not to splurge on things above
and beyond what I need, so for me this represents a nice meter. I decided on
the AM-510 because a lot of people online seemed to consider it the best in its
price range, with really good input protection. Unlike my old "standard", it's
autoranging as a voltmeter, and as an ammeter it has a microamp range, which I
considered a plus because I want to spend more time working with
microcontrollers in ultra lower power configurations. It also measures
capacitance, which my old meter didn't and which will be handy for identifying
random caps pulled out of junk piles because I'm rubbish at remembering the
codes. Finally, it frequeny and duty cycle settings, which I also think I'll
get some use out of for making sure that my digital clock signals are in spec.
This has already lead to the shocking revelation that my homebrew Z80 machie is
actually clocked at 5Mhz and not the 10MHz I thought it was, due to me tapping
the wrong output of a ripple counter. That's embarassing!
As for soldering, way back when I lived in California I used a cheap soldering
station from Weller with temperature control. Not the fancy digital kind of
temperature control where there's a sensor in the iron, but at least there was a
knob you could use to get some kind of control. When I moved to NZ, getting
anything like this from a well-known manufacturer at a sensible price was
impossible (from the point of view of the modern industrial world, New Zealand
has a population of approximately zero and is located approximately one billion
kilometers away from anything else, so in general the range of *anything* on
offer is very limited and shockingly overpriced. It's barely worth having any
but the most mainstream hobbies or interests there), so I ended up with two
totally fixed temperature pencil irons by the Japanese brand Goot, a 20W model
and a 40W model, both with conical tips, which is my preference. Despite being
very humble and cheap irons, they actually served me just fine and I licked
them better than my Weller, the tips were very easy to keep clean and tinned.
I would have happily bought more Goot irons here if I could find them, but it
seems like they don't export them far beyond the Pacific, because I couldn't.
So Amazon.de to the rescue once again. I've bought a 30W fixed temperature
pencil iron from Esra. I'd never heard of them, but they're a German
manufacturer who have been making irons since the 1920s, so hopefully it's not a
lemon. I deliberately bought one iron with a power rating directly between the
two Goot irons I used to have in the hopes that this would let me use the one
iron (I used the 40W Goot for soldering to large switches etc. and for
desoldering with wick, and the 20W for everything else, e.g. soldering typical
components). I bought a conical tip for the Esra, since it shipped with a
chisel. It doesn't come to quite as fine a point as my 20W Goot's tip, but I
don't think it will be unworkable.
The third bit of kit that most hobbyists want is an oscilloscope. I had one in
NZ but obviously left it behind, it being a hulking big thing from the 70s. I'm
not sure if I want to go through the hassle of finding an old used one here only
to sell it when I leave, or whether I should join the local hackerspace and use
one of their scopes when I really need one and try to get by without my own, as
part of a general decluttering.
Electronics is kind of my "vice hobby" at the moment, in that it's the hobby
that probably least accords with my efforts to move my life toward being as
simple, sustainable and frugal as possible. In my next entry I'll talk about my
attempts to do "damage control" by practicing a "bad" hobby in the best way
possible.
