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?"

My bench inventory

[QuasiEvil]

Right behind a decent handheld DMM, a scope is about the second piece of bench gear I recommend to anyone. Old used digital scopes are so darn cheap anymore (my TDS340A that I've had for 18 years can now be had for $250-400 on eBay), and they really help you visualize what's going on in the circuit. I'd give up just about every other piece of real lab gear I own to keep my scope, because the rest is either for specific past projects, or is just nicer to work with, but could be substituted with lesser quality gear. There's no substitute for a decent scope in my opinion, but I do a lot of pure analog or serial stuff where being able to capture and stare at a waveform can go a long way towards finding a problem. Plus, all that digital eventually gets down to the real world, where ugly analog problems eventually rear their head again (slew rate, parasitics, transmission line uglies, etc.)

I'd bet I have my scope fired up 80% of the time that I'm not strictly working on firmware, and probably 20-30% of the time that I'm just working on code.

My main bench gear:
  - Tektronix TDS340A scope
  - HP 33401 bench DMM
  - A couple various portable DMMs - one Fluke 87V, a couple cheapo Chinese, and a couple super cheapo Harbor Freight
  - Saleae Logic16 logic analyzer (awesome tool, by the way...)
  - Four old Lambda LLS lab power supplies
  - Old HP 3310B function generator
  - For soldering, a Hakko 936 iron, modified toaster oven for reflowing, and a hot air rework station
  - a pile of other strippers, crimpers, pliers, screwdrivers, tweezers, magnifiers, and assorted hand tools including my favorite Xcelite MS-545-J cutters
  - USBtinyISP for programming AVRs, Picstart 2 for programming PICs
  - Mendelmax 3d printer for printing out parts and prototypes
  - And a pile of other stuff to make the work more pleasant - my dev PC, a beer fridge, a TV, a Blu-ray player, a mythtv frontend box, a laser printer, bins of electrical and mechanical parts, datasheets I use frequently, etc.

I like all of the stuff, and wouldn't trade any of it, though I keep thinking about one of those new Agilent DSOX2024 scopes. I probably won't, though - my old Tek does well enough, and it has a great deal of sentimental value for all the years and projects we've done together. The only thing I'd really like is waveform capture on something that wasn't a 3.5" floppy...

Re:A Bunch ...

[BlueStrat]

What's on my workbench? A bunch of dead computers. The quality of name brand PC's has gone into the toilet. Commodity quality served up to the mass markets leaves very little quality to be found.

What you need is a good ol' Sun SparcStation with an old release of Red Hat Linux installed on it. No end of fun. Really cool little computers, too and greased lightning with a tiny kernel. :)

Heh. I've got an old SGI Octane running IRIX 6.5.30 UNIX. Great fun. With a buss that has ~3ms between any two I/O points and optical digital audio I/O, it's still quite useful for some audio recording/processing/storage tasks related to home recording studio work.

I also design and build vacuum tube guitar amplifiers, where my '70s-era two-channel analog 60mHz delayed-sweep Tektronix 453A 'scope still serves me well. It used to be used on avionics out on the tarmac in Nebraska and then Michigan, in winters & summers, baked and frozen, buried in snow and half-submerged in water, and has been blown hundreds of feet multiple times across the flightline tarmac from prop wash and jet exhaust and still functioned like a champ. Worst result was it lost some paint, gained some scuffs, and needed re-calibration. Not even the handle broke.

Many tens of thousands of years from now when humans are long gone and aliens are doing archaeological digs on Earth, they'll be shocked when they dig down, following a faint energy signal, only to find an old Tektronix 'scope still displaying a trace from when the tech left for the last time and forgot to turn it off. :)

Strat