How to Set Up an Electronic Workstation

One of my favorite activities is building things, especially if electronics are involved. For us a a lab, the ability to build small devices (or at least prototypes) helps us save money and greatly enables our science. How to get started? First, you need a properly equipped workstation, which can be a challenge when you get started. In this post, I will show you what I have for a total of less than $1000. I will follow up with more posts about basic skills and approaches to get you started.
DISCLAIMERS: (1) If you do not know what you are doing, things are potentially dangerous. Applies to everything in life, including tinkering with electronics! (2) I wanted to make your life easy and show you what I use. I have no commercial interest or affiliations with any of these companies. However, Amazon pays me a small fee if you buy any of the products through any of these links.
Let's break the equipment down into few main categories:

Equipment for Testing and Measuring 

• DC Power Supply: Lets you power your circuit with a voltage of your choice. Importantly, it also shows you ho much current your circuit is drawing. This will give you an idea how long your battery will last if you ultimately battery power your circuit. For example, if your circuit draws 200 mA and you have a battery with 600mAh capacity, the battery will in theory last for three hours. Got it? Here is what I use:

• Oscilloscope: This device lets you visualize and measure signals. Initially a bit of a challenge to operate but once you have figured it out (topic for a future post), you will love it! Modern digital scopes do lots of measurements for you and also let you save the data for further offline processing. They can get quite pricey as you increase the number of signals you can visualize at the same time (aka channels) and the sampling rate (how fast the signals are the device can measure). The scope will be your largest single ticket item but definitely worth it! Here is a model that I feel is a great trade-off and it is the one that I bought for my company, Pulvinar Neuro:

• Function Generator: Now that you have a power supply and a scope to measure your signals, you will also need a device that generates well-defined (test) signals. In other words you need a function generator. This device lets you select from a range of different waveforms that you can then feed into your equipment to test it. Here is the one I recently bought:

• Multimeter: Often, you just want to measure a single value and not an entire signal (over time). You can easily do this with a multimeter. You really cannot got wrong with this as long as you get one that has the "auto-range" functionality, which most of them do once you spend more than $15. They let you measure voltage (check that battery!), resistance (is that fuse blown?), and current (why is this wire getting hot?). 

Equipment for Building 
Now that we have spent the majority of our budget on the test equipment, we will use the remainder (ca $250) on tools to build circuits.

• Soldering Station: At some point, you want to properly connect circuit components without all the loose wires of a typical breadboard. You need to learn how to solder - not that hard - just make sure you do not burn yourself! Here is a soldering station similar to one I recently got. It includes a hot air gun (convenient for heatshrink tubing):

• Helping Hands: Unfortunately (?!) we only have two hands but building and testing circuits often requires more. Here is a nifty tool I like:

Magnifier with LED Light: Electronic components get smaller every year (and/or my eyesight worse). I highly recommend a magnifier with an LED light. Avoid the cheaper ones with a bulb that contains mercury!

Smoke Absorber: Finally, when you solder (please use lead-free solder!) without a smoke absorber you are inhaling fumes that may or may not give you Alzheimer's disease but my approach to environmental toxins is always to play it safe. Thus: