Hardware tool

Good equipment to buy when getting started

Getting started with electronics design takes buying some equipment, but it can be confusing what to buy. I'm going to list here some of the items that I throught were helpful getting started. For all equipment and especially components salvage can be a nice cheap way to aquire stuff see: Salvage Topics.

Breadboard with power supply

Most people start with electronics by connecting up circuits on a breadboard. A breadboard is great for trying out circuits before moving to more permanent construction techniques such as perfboard or custom PCBs.

Spools of wire

Wire is available as stranded or solid. Solid works best with breadboards and perfboards. Stranded works best when creating cables for interboard connections. Stranded is nice an fexible and does not break quicky when bent back and forth, solid is easy to press into perf board, breadboard and stays bent the way you bend it. Lots of bending will break solid wire.

Try to get many different colors of wire. Tracing a single wire through a big circuit is almost impossible if all the wires are the same color.

Multimeter

Radio Shack is a good source of cheap multimeters.

Oscilloscope

An oscilloscope is critical for debugging analog circuits or communication protocols. I prefer PC based oscilloscopes since they are cheaper then dedicated equipment and are more automated then a traditional phosphor oscilloscope.

See oscilloscope

Storage compartments

As more components are bought, it becomes necessary to store all the components in an organized way and storage compartments are very helpful. These can be bought at the local home improvement or hardware store.

Resistor kit

It's important to have alot of different resistor values around as it's almost impossible to buy the correct values in advance. Digikey sells resistors in kits that have a small number of all the standard resistor values.

Capacitor kit

Capacitors are like resistors. You need a large number of values. Digikey also sells capacitor kits in addition to the resistor kits.

Microcontroller Programmer/ICD

Microcontrollers are a great way to get started in digital electronics. They are essentially a little computer on a single chip. Unlike large computers these processors usually don't run a full blown operating system so dedicated hardware is used for programming an debugging. In Circuit Debugging are the preferred way to go for development since it's a huge time saver to be able to program and debug software without needing to pull the chip from the circuit. Spend the extra money -- it is worth it.

Development Boards

Main Article: demo board

If you are willing to spend some money development boards are a quick way to get started. They typically have a microcontroller, voltage regulator, some LEDs, and some sensors all on one board. The downside is that if you break anything on the board you have to buy a whole new board. With discrete components only the broken part needs to be replaced. On the other hand, more and more components are only available in surface mount packages which almost require a custom PCB to use at all. ARM processors are relatively powerful microcontroller but at present are not available in through hole versions.