Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Hardware Lab Bench?

50000BTU_barbecue writes "I made a comment a few days ago in a story basically saying the oscilloscope is dead. While that's a bit dramatic, I've found that over the last 20 years my oscilloscopes have been 'on' less and less. Instead, I use a combination of judicious voltage measurements, a logic analyzer and a decent understanding of the documentation of the gadget I'm working on. Stuff is just more and more digital and microcontroller-based, or just so cheap yet incredibly integrated that there's no point in trying to work on it. (I'm thinking RC toys for example. Undocumented and very cheap. Doesn't work? Buy another.) While I still do old-school electronics like circuit-level troubleshooting (on old test gear), that's not where the majority of hobbyists seem to be. Yet one thing I keep hearing is how people want an oscilloscope to work on hardware. I think it's just not that necessary anymore. What I use most are two regulated DC lab supplies, a frequency counter, a USB logic analyzer, a USB I2C/SPI master, and a USB-RS-232 dongle. That covers a lot of modern electronics. I have two oscilloscopes, a 100MHz two-channel stand-alone USB unit and a 1960s analog plug-in-based mainframe that is a '70s hacker dream scope. But I rarely use them anymore. What equipment do hardware folks out there use the most? And would you tell someone trying to get into electronics that they need a scope?"

Comments

thats silly

[Anonymous Coward]

need a pullup? a scope will show you
have fighting drivers? insufficient path to ground? noise on the rails?

if you're doing anything aside from poking at other peoples stuff thats cheap and
disposable, you need a scope

Re:thats silly

[wavedeform]

For most digital work these days, you really just need a logic analyzer.

Unless your logic analyzer can show you ringing or capacitance / inductance problems on the digital signal lines, this is not really true. "Digital" signals on a circuit board are analog after all, and are subject to a lot of the same gremlins that plague an all analog circuit. This sort of thing doesn't always matter in a digital circuit, but you need a good scope to find them when they cause problems.

My desktop

[taniwha]

On my office work bench:

Binocular microscope
soldering station
solder
flxes
large magnifying glass with light ring
project boxes full of SMD parts
tweezers
side cutters (dikes in the US)
scrap wire

storage scope/logic analyzer
power supply

In the other room:

cheap chinese reflow oven
cheap chinese stencil jig
(and if I can finally persuade my wife) cheap chinese pick and place ,machine

At this point I have to point out that almost all my best tools these days are cheap and from China, mostly bought off of aliexpress at prices maybe 10% of what I used to spend buying from the US - stuff I'd never ever have considered buying for myself 2-3 years ago. In this case being cheap and from China doesn't mean low quality or non-functional, quite the opposite.