I spent a couple decades in the electronics industry, and with this in mind, I ran across a couple worthwhile articles for the electronics hobbyists out there. First off, if you are doing anything more complicated than building some (old school, TTL cookbook) ‘learning projects’ you can certainly use a decent schematic entry app. DZ863 has a web service which (for free!) allows you to get started in this sort of project documentation. Form having looked it over, I can see that it is a pretty good deal (for free!).
Of course, the biggest topic for beginners in this hobby is to create your own ‘lab’ for electronics. There are plenty of big and little things you will need, sooner or later. Kenneth Finnegan has a great site which (along with a lot of other good stuff for beginners) provides about as good a starting list of the tools and gear needed to get into creating circuits. Bon appétit!
Create Electrical Circuit Schematics Online
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/dz863-electrical-circuit-schematics
Numerous desktop applications let you create schematics for electrical circuits. But often these tools are accompanied by a price tag and feature a complicated interface. Here to offer you a free and friendlier solution is a site called DZ863.
DZ863 is a web service that lets you create electrical schematics for free and which works best in Chrome and Firefox. Components are easily locatable and can be added to your diagrams without any difficulty. You will find that all necessary components for electronic circuits are available in DZ863’s interface. Datasheets for many of these components are also available on the site and can be searched for.
With their schematic complete, people who have created a free account on SZ863 can save their diagram online and export it to JPG, PNG, GIF, or SVG files.
Check out DZ863 @ www.dz863.com
How to Draw an Electrical Schematic online
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEzNc-5p5AA&feature=player_embedded
Getting Started in Electronics Tinkering: A Shopping List
http://www.howtogeek.com/news/getting-started-in-electronics-tinkering-a-shopping-list/5361
So You Want to Build Electronics
http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/2011/06/so-you-want-to-build-electronics.html
Equipment – This is where it gets a little hard because you can spend $20 on a soldering iron, and you can spend $10,000 on a soldering iron. I’m going to try to recommend you get second shelf equipment, because the cheap stuff will just waste your time and be frustrating, but understandably, we’re just hobbyists.
- Needle nose, pliers, and wire cutters
- Flush cutters.
- Tweezers – Also get plastic ones if you’re doing chemical PCB etching.
- Dental picks – Very nice for scraping, poking, prodding, etc, while soldering.
- Wire strippers – You’ll usually see people using the combination wire strippers / crimpers. I wasted too much of my life dealing with these before realizing how much better real wire strippers are.
- Hot glue gun – Super useful for assembling prototype cases, insulating stuff, etc. Just don’t put it on anything that dissipates power like a linear regulator.
- Blue tape – For crudely insulating joints, holding things together, and being a marking surface for hole positions on black plastic.
- Screwdriver
- Breadboards – I would buy a few columns more than what you think you need, because running out of space half way through a project sucks. I have 5 single column boards, a two column board, and a 4 column board, which is a little excessive, but I got good deals on them from friends not wanting them after our college electronics classes, and it is nice being able to have a few different prototyped projects sitting around at once.
- Breadboard wires – These are reusable, but at some point you do need to start culling the used ones and replenish the kit.
- Clip leads
- Coin envelopes – These are surprisingly useful for storing different values of resistors, or diodes, or anything else tiny.
- Altoids tins – I love these tins for basic project boxes, as well as storing bulkier components such as transistors and crystals.
- Solder sucker / Solder braid – Once you start soldering parts together, you’re going to start making mistakes soldering parts together. These undo those inevitable mistakes.
- 30x Jewelers loupe – I use this ALL the time to check for solder bridges and cold solder joints.
- Volt / MultiMeter – Repeat after me: do not buy the $15 one at the hardware store. Also make sure you have a spare fuse in stock for this. You will only ever blow your amp meter fuse when you’re using it.
- Power supply – I managed to find a nice power supply where someone mounted an ATA computer supply in a box with screw lugs for 3.3, 5, 12, and -12V. You can go for a fancy variable supply, but I didn’t. At the very least you’ll want a nice breadboard power supply.
- Soldering Iron – I own the last generation Hakko 936, but it’s safe to assume the more recent 888 model is just as good. The difference between a $20 soldering iron and a $100 soldering iron is amazing. Being able to turn the iron down to 300C and not worry about destroying PCBs makes soldering a lot easier.
- Tip cleaner
- Fine gauge solder – I use .032 diameter solder, and even that is a little thick some times; the finer the better. I also have some 0.1" solder for bulk heat-sink or strain joint soldering, but its use is rare.
- Helping third hand – When you’re soldering, these are priceless.
- Calipers – I use these more for my mechanical engineering projects, but it is still useful for measuring clearances and pitch.
- Oscilloscope – The holy grail of the hobbyist shop. Consumer scopes have finally gotten to the point where they’re reasonably priced and GOOD. A lot of companies have started coming out with toy USB or iPhone oscilloscopes, and I’ll just remind you that they really are just toys. Remember that the scope isn’t going to do you much good without probes, so do some research and pick out the specific probes and cables you want to use with your scope, and expect to spend some money on these as well, because a good scope with bad cables is going to waste your time
