A Solderpunk once more

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.