Removing The Barriers

Welcome to the Mac fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts, Parker, Dolman. And Steven Craig. This is episode 306. So we got something new on our website, macro fab.com. Go to macro. If you go to macro.com/podcast that we have a Subscribe button. Finally, finally, 300 Something episodes in, you can subscribe, you can subscribe through our website to get to the podcast. I think it basically like hooks into all the apps and all that good stuff. Yeah, pulls up a little like sub window that you can go to whoever is your favorite.

Exactly. And there's also a macro app.com/slack. And you do that you get to our, our public Slack channel where we have basic conversations about the podcasts or articles, anything that's in Electrical Engineering News, with 600 other fellow podcasts and MacFadden through Z adjusts. I like that.

You know we've we've said this many, many times, but it's worth just continuously saying the Slack channel is absolutely amazing. All the people in there are fantastic. And I see messages come by not to me just in general chat all the time of engineers asking other engineers for their thoughts and opinions and just ideas for things or just throwing down like, Hey, I found this really cool part, maybe someone will like it. And so if those kinds of things really excite you, I know I love seeing that every day, come join Mac fab.com/slack. And then we haven't set it up yet. An easy way to find our live stream. But it will probably be something like macro.com/live stream or slash twitch. But it's if you go to twitch.tv/macro fab, you can watch our live stream, which we do at six o'clock central time.

Tuesdays, Tuesdays, yes, I was trying to figure out what part of the time I forgot. And that was the dates.

And one more thing, one more piece of news is next week, we are doing our annual Star Wars podcast. And it is going to be insane because we want to have we'll have Steven, of course, me. And then we're also going to have raus. And Hi Ron. And I think Chris Craft is going to show up to Chris confirmed with Chris but I think Chris was was interested. And so we're going to have those three on to talk about Star Wars, particularly the tech and Star Wars.

Yeah, let's give a quick description for those who maybe haven't been around. So once a year, we we do a Star Wars episode where we talk about technology and engineering in Star Wars. But it also tends to leak out into other sci fi worlds but we've just kind of pinned it as a Star Wars Episode. And and it's kind of been just a fun thing that Parker and I can look forward to every year to just have a have an episode where we can pick apart things in the movies and prove things or disprove things. And then we get guests on every year to join us and they weigh in with their opinions on things. So yeah, tune in next week for that. It's it's really fun every year. I think it's gonna be our sixth one. Yeah. Wow. Six, awesome. And I was looking at those Roz Chris Kraft and Hi Ron have been on multiple episodes in the past so you can go listen to a lot of them. I mean, we probably have between the three of them. We probably have 10 to 15 episodes. Yeah, as guests. I think Roz was on last couple years the Star Wars podcast and Hi Ron was as well. That's right. Yeah. So I think this would be Chris crafts first. Star Wars podcasts or Star Wars in Yeah. Oh, man, like that original Star Wars podcast back in December 2016. In the post office bomb shelter, and we actually so that's actually the only properly video recorded podcast as well. So go that's actually still on YouTube. Go check that out.

I haven't enlisted viewers because it like forever. It only had like 200 views. I mentioned it has like it has 200 I'm impressed. Oh,

I had 200 Like the first year and then didn't get any more. Yeah, go check that out. Yeah, I'll let you know. That that was that was such a fun production to do. Because Josh set up like a multicam setup. Josh was our audio engineer. It was a whole thing. Yeah, it was it took hours to do is a lot of fun. On. It's just the whole multicam setup was really cool. 326 views. So we gained 126 Over the last four years. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was all fun. No, no, it was a blast. Yeah, we always Yeah, it's That's always one of those ones. I mean, let's let's be honest, every episode, we tend to have a really good good time. But this one we always look forward to it like, although this one this year is a little bit different. Because this year we don't have like a piece of really, really big, like Disney content to talk about. So we get to there is kind of go into the tendrils of others. Yeah, sure. There is Star Wars visions, which isn't canon. And that's a highly I think I'm the only person in our Star Wars group that we talked about Star Wars that actually likes it so well, okay, so Mandalorian season three is coming out sometime next year, I think. Yes. Next year, the book of Boba Fett coming out end of this month. After this, then not yet after way. It's like it's almost the end of the year kind of thing. And then and then from there. I don't I don't know like what the next movies supposed to be from Disney.

I don't think they've announced one like, a date. Gotta look it up now. Now we're turning this into a Star Wars EPS.

Word ext. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to dig too far. Okay, yeah, I don't think there is one yet. So. Alright, so what are we talking about today? We've been we've been wanting to talk about this for weeks, for weeks now, except that we kept coming up with either different topics. Well, no, we were supposed to talk about this topic back at Thanksgiving. And we ended up talking about beer for 15 minutes.

homebrew in beer. Yep. And so this is a continuation of our talk about soldering equipment, soldering supplies, like building your own electronics lab, at home, or at your office like, like if you're a startup. So this is we're going to talk about bench equipment for test and or developments. They would lean more towards developments, like actually designing hardware instead of test because we talked about test equipment all the time. So I think we're gonna lean more towards development.

Yeah, the requirements are slightly different. If you're, if you're going towards development grants, honestly, when I'm when I'm looking at test stuff, I'm not looking at something that's, you know, I'm looking for something that was within budget gets the job done and will last forever. Whereas with development, my criteria is quite a bit different.

Yeah, a lot lower. Typically, depending on what you're designing, of course, because obviously, you you're designing like cell phones or something like that, or up in the gigahertz range of frequencies, you got to spend some money on getting the right piece of equipment. So this is not really a talk about that stuff. So this is like design your own first piece of hardware, your electrical engineer right out of college, maybe, or you have a start up and you need to supply your hardware engineers with some equipment to actually get stuff done.

So the first thing we're going to talk about is the lab power supply. Now, Steven, what was your first lab power supply? Huh? You still have it? I do. I might. My first personal one. Yeah, let me go grab it real quick. Okay, so I'll talk about my first personal one. While Stevens doing that, is I built my own. I took a rate a was a, I took a radio apart and got the transformer out of it. Combine that with an LM 317, and a potentiometer, and a fan and an eye. I can't remember where I got the heatsink from. And I made a wooden box and had a little had displays on it. So you could see how much voltage and how much amperage it was outputting and that's, I use that all the way through college. Nice. Oh, wow, this is awesome. So I've got my very first power supply. Right here. Ooh, Lucky. It's a nice, it's a dual. What does your 230 volt three amp with a five volt three amp in the middle kind of guy. And it's from circuit specialist.com. In fact Like Service Specialist, it's written on the front of this power supply. I bought this. I don't remember how long ago, long, long time ago. And what's great is it looks like they still sell this. Actually, you know, it's funny, I remember paying $199 for this. Gosh, it was it was right out of college, I bought this 190 999 bucks for this, and it is $205 now, so it's kind of 25 bucks in 1112 years, something like that. Yeah, and this thing is still chugging. It's great. I mean, it's heavy. It's big. It's a big old linear guy with a giant transformer in it. But yeah, yeah, the, the only thing that really sucks about this power supply that I think is really dumb, is you can't turn the supply on. With current limiting on, you have to turn it on, and then activate current limiting. So it doesn't work to like, cold turn this on into. Like, it doesn't have like an output enable button kind of thing. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, the only way to determine the current limiting on it, is to short it. And then like press Up Down buttons and watch the curve.

Go up and down to go up. What power supply I had to use that did that too. I can't remember

it. Yeah, those are some pretty bad features. If you ask me, I wouldn't call very bad features. Yeah, it's not features at all. But you know, this one does have series parallel, on on a button on front. So it is kind of nice to have a supply that can do zero to 60 volts, three amps. Or I guess zero to 38, six amps. I'm looking for a picture of this power supply built. I'm trying to find pictures from 12 years ago, peering into the archives on my website, basically. I don't know why you're doing that. To be honest, if you're getting a brand new power supply, I think power supplies are actually it's very much worth getting something that is halfway decent to begin with. I agree, because you can run into a lot of problems that you think is your circuit, and ends up just being garbage power. In fact, I'm running into that right now, at work, I'm powering my units from a really nice Keithley supply that I have. And then I'll switch over to a nother to another power supply that is considerably worse. And I get I get different calibration. Or I get I get issues with it. Let's just put it that way. And so you know, it's interesting to see like, just to be able to switch between the two and just see how much of an impact a good versus a bad Power Supply has. It's really tangible at that point. And so if you got a little bit of extra money, you might want to consider buying a good power supply. And one of the things to consider is like, well, what is good versus bad? How do you know what is good? Let's just put it this way. If you're, if you're going to Amazon and you'll find a power supply that has like really crazy specs, and it's like 30 bucks. That's probably a good indicator. It's not a good power supply. Good power supply. Yep. And in general, most people I mean, it's a lot it's different nowadays if he asked me but if you can avoid a switch mode, power supply benchtop power supply, I would I'd still go with a linear if you go with a big chunky linear power supply you'll get you'll get better noise and you'll get better. You can drive a variety of loads better with Yes, much better. Anything that's inductive will be much happier. Yeah, switch modes kind of hate inductive loads, right? So if you're doing something with motors, then you're gonna have some issues. Well not just

that though, is also other switch mode power supplies. Like if you're designing a circuit, they're not going to be really happy with a noisy you know, lot benchtop switcher as well, right? Because those are really designed to most circuits are designed off batteries or off like USB power, which are generally clean sources of power. So So I found a picture of my first power supply that I built it. So it's on the stream right now. Oh, rock and roll. Yeah, I think there's a schematic too.

So those are those power supplies that I'm talking about that are like 30 bucks and do like 30 volts five amps. The I think those are actually they have really good applications. But most of the time like I would use those if I needed. Let's say I had like a heater on a on something that I needed to just dump heat into. And I needed to have a control switching current, that would be a great power supply to do that, or let's say I was doing like, I know a Parker, Utah, you've talked in the past about like anodising, or something like that you could use a supply like that where you just dump a bunch of current into a, you know, an electrolyte bath or whatever, like, yeah, those power supplies are good for those kinds of applications. But if you're developing, you know, some kind of circuit that it like requires any kind of precision, I would not I would steer away from those. Yeah, I would recommend because for basically $300, you can get like, a three channel or two channel, linear power supply that's adjustable, that can go you know, couple amps up to like, usually, it's like 30 volts per channel. On My Shelf, I gotta siglent up there. It's like the baseball segments. There's a base. What's the Rygel? One that we had at work? Starts with a three, I think, yeah, the only problem with the Rygel is it's got a weird number pad thingy on it. It's like Rygel eight something. Oh, DP 831? Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, that's, that's also really good power supply, too. It's a great supply. You know, actually, that that brings up a good point. One thing too, that that seems really enticing. But the more you use supplies, you'll find out that it's not like you can, you'll start getting into like you searching for power supplies. And then you'll see like, Oh, this one moves in 100 millivolt steps, but this other one moves in 10, millivolt steps, and then you can buy an upgrade to move it in one millivolt steps 99.9% of the time, your power supply doesn't need that kind of resolution. So, you know, really, really consider what your applications are, like, just globally, what you're looking for, if this is just a box that's gonna dump out five volts, or 3.3 or 12, or something like that. Do you really need one millivolt resolution? And are you do you really need to spend an extra 150 bucks to get that or more? No, it's gonna be more than that. Right, right. And then on top of that, like, what if you really do need that? Are you now are you running into a problem where you're trying to use your power supply as like a reference standard? And now you're trying to like cross the boundaries between it doing a job that is really not intended to? Because Because the thing about reference standards is they're not supposed to. You're not supposed to draw a lot of current. Right, right. Yeah. Do you guys on one millivolt resolution at five amps? Yeah, that's actually one thing I think about lab power supplies is I would get a multichannel. And then lean towards more amperage than less amperage. Because you can always serialize those two channels, and get, you know, basically double voltage, assuming assuming their outputs are floating, which that's 99% of the time. That's, that's actually a good point. If you get a two channel or three channel, make sure each channels is floating between each other. Right. So you can you can configure that how they feel like it based off of how you plug them in. Yeah, yeah. paralyze to, you know, double your current or serialize it double your voltage, or just flip them around for negative and not getting into trouble. Yeah, that's true, too. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, so I'd recommend I really like to siglent when I have. There's a we had a right we have a rival one at work.

There was there was when I was looking at, you know, one feature that that's on fancier supplies, I shouldn't even say fancier just like, whatever supplies that I just don't even care about. And I wouldn't even spend money on. Like, if it comes on it cool, if not, whatever, I don't care about keypads at all. I, I need a little wheel that I can turn and I need to be able to select which digit I'm adjusting. But I don't care to type in 12.625, Enter. And it goes to that I can just spin the wheel to it. Because here's the thing, like having a having a keypad or whatever is really nice and all but all said and done 99% of time your power supply, you set it up. And then it stays in the same configuration for the majority of your development. So it's not something that you're touching all the time, unless you're just like turning it on and off, or enabling outputs and things like that. So having all of these extra digital features that go on top is cool, but you'll use them very rarely. So if that contributes to the price, and you're being really cost conscientious, go with one that has better specs, but less buttons on the front, I guess. Yeah. And one thing we didn't touch on here is make sure it has it can be current limited And on top of that is make sure you can current limit it, while it's outputting. So you can adjust it, you know, while it's trying to supply your circuit power, oh, in other words, it's not it doesn't like latch, and then you have to unlatch it to, yeah, like power it off and turn it back on, because some of the less expensive ones are only that way. Going back to what you were talking about with not like being adjusted with knobs, having the current adjust on a knob is really convenient on figuring out how much current your device needs to operate basically. So like I have the Cygwin. And then I have a really cheap it's like a h y 1803, which is, it's actually a really good parasite. But a lot of engineers, especially on like, the E V blog will, like shun you away from them. Because they're, it's got a really bad failure mode, which is like it connects like part of your circuit to like mains. So if like the main transistor, and it blows up or something, oh, that's, that's lovely. But the great thing about it is it's it's a linear power supply. And it's got two knobs on the front. And that's it. That's love, voltage and current. So one of the thing that is enticing about power supplies, but and I've gone for this in the past, and then realize that I, if I really wanted it, I would buy it for the application, like having USB, or GP IB or whatever, like specialty control on supplies. That's super awesome. But you almost never use it until you need it. And then the time that you need it, you would buy the power supply for that reason. So like that one more on the test side to 100% 100%. Like if I was developing a testbed, I would go specifically specify a power supply that had that such that I could build that into my test rig. But for my benchtop guy that I just need to pop on, throw some voltage in and start playing with like, I just never use it whatsoever. So just keep that in mind. That's like everything that we're talking about here adds cost to your supply and adds features, but doesn't necessarily make its underlying function better. It's just features to control its underlying function.

Yep. Okay, that's the lab power supply.

Yeah, I think we beat that one to death. Yeah. oscilloscope is probably like the next big one that when, when people imagine what electronics layer looks like, it's just it's a bunch of oscilloscope with Licious you like spinning on the screens everywhere? Exactly. Yeah. So as little scopes important. Steven, I have like, conflicting views on oscilloscope because he uses one practically daily in development, I use one whenever something bad is happening with my circuit. It's not the first thing I've reached for when doing development. But I do have one, it's very important because you sometimes you just got to look at that signal and figure out what's going on. So for me, I would say you can buy, again, I've been using that work, kind of like a medium low range sequence. And it's been pretty fantastic. I'm not doing high speed stuff. It's only a 200 megahertz scope.

And actually speaking of that, if you want to learn more about oscilloscope, especially if you're going to go buy one and talk about bandwidth is a very good video that just came out about what that means for a scope.

I will let me see if I can find what that is. Yeah, and having it like Parker said, I use a scope nearly every day. And I lean a lot more towards digital scopes now than I have in the past. Although analog scopes are fantastic for general, everyday work that I do, because I'm looking a lot at amplitude, and doing calibration to particular points and things like that. And analog scopes make that really, really quick. Now Oh, so the video is by actually James Lewis, who's been on our podcast about engineer. So yeah, well, I'll post this video. And it's like a 10 minute video about just like what does bandwidth mean for our cell scopes and interesting Enough. That channel he's on element 14 is doing a whole series about Workbench stuff, which we're talking about this week. So, yeah, go check out that video because there's a lot of specs in as little scopes, and like, it might not even matter to you about how much bandwidth you have.

So I would aim, if this is like a new lab that you're setting up and you're just doing like IOT stuff? Or are the wall controllers or audio amplifiers or something like that, like a 200 megahertz scope? To channel would probably be fine. Oh, four channels would be awesome.

But yeah, two channels mostly gets you through most things. Yeah, there's, there's only rare situations I've run into where I really, really could use for, yeah, like I can get away with to

usually get away with too. There's, I would say, just say more, I would aim for the more modern scope to verse a buying like a huge scope on eBay. Because most time when you get one off eBay, it's not gonna be calibrated, you probably gonna have to recap it. Like, I have a old Tektronix TDs 520, which is a 500 megahertz scope. It's actually awesome, because it's like one of the last analog all screen like it's all analog. It's got CRT and everything. But it's got like, the digital readouts that are on the screen like, so you can actually like you, you can just look at a number and see the frequency. And except like on my old Techtronic with 464, we have to like, see what your division is, and then count on the screen, how many tick marks it is.

So modern scopes can just measure way more stuff faster and more accurately.

And just because it's not a CRT doesn't mean it's bad, like the modern LCDs refresh just as fast. Like there was an old omen that we had at work. Nothing was garbage. But I mean, it worked. It worked barely. Yeah. Whereas like, it's interesting for the same price nowadays, you can get a siglent. I know I'm harping on, like saying sickle on a lot, but that's the equipment I have. Yeah, it's what you're used to.

And that scope is awesome. Now, I think it's like a SDS series scope. So at this point, I yeah, I would say even like, don't even try to go to like flea markets and find an old scope or don't do that used to be the only way to get there was decent, right? Right. Yeah, like, but But nowadays, like, save up a few pennies, and by whatever decent, like Reigle, or siglent, or whatever you can get, and I guarantee you'll be happy. Honestly, for me, what I've run into is like screen refresh, is one of the things I care about more than like, overall bandwidth, because I just want to be able to see my signals faster. And really, screen refresh, especially on these more modern LCD scopes. And then like, how responsive is that the buttons and knobs? Because the worst thing is like using the knob, and the encoder isn't refreshed fast enough. So like you end up like scrolling backwards for some reason. Yeah. Oh, when scope did that all the time, that thing was garbage. You know, this is on virtually every digital scope now. But it is a thing that this is probably the one mode I use more than anything else is just pause, just stop and see your waveforms printed on the screen. Because so many times I have to look at, you know, what is X signal doing versus why signal a, you know, at particular times, and just being able to do a single wave capture, or even a capture of, you know, a handful of periods of a wave and then be able to scroll around. That's the biggest thing about digital scopes for me that, like I'm even fine with taking lower bit resolution on the screen if I have that capability. Yep, I

agree. No, that's really all I have about SAYBOLT scopes, I guess

I didn't get no, the the only other thing I can think of is sometimes and it for me, it's really sometimes having like math functions is nice. So like some scope will allow you to apply an FFT. So when you get a rudimentary spectrum analyzer kind of out of it, sort of Yeah. And some other scopes will allow you to do like A plus B or A minus B or A times B, that kind of stuff. And that's, that's fun and nice. And there's a few situations where that works out. But, but I wouldn't buy my scope based on those things. No, and most, I'd say actually, every single modern digital scope I've used has those things built in. Right, right. So all right. Next frequency generator. I do I own one of these. I do. Yeah, you do. In fact, I have the same one you do? Yeah, I think I, I bought this one because you recommend it cuz I think I had one project I needed it. And that was about it. And it was cheap. It was inexpensive. Yes. Yeah. It was like 40 bucks on ebay or something like that. To be to be fully honest. I wouldn't buy a frequency generator nowadays. No. Like, there's just like, if you need one, you know, you need one. But for anybody else, like you don't need it. Yeah. And at work, I designed and make frequency generators. So I don't need any like, I just use the product as the frequency generator, you know, so and what you what you make is probably better than what a frequency generator could do? Well, $40, better isn't the right word there. But it's more like it's more in tune with being able to test all the other things I need to do. Because it's the right amplitudes it's the right like all the all the connections. So much more as I as I grow as an engineer is like, how do I reduce the barriers for me getting my job done. So if I have to make a custom connector or cable or something like that, that's fine at all. And that's great. So maybe I'll make a custom connector one day for a really nice frequency generator. But if I can get away with just using the product that I have, and maybe it's not as good as my frequency generator, but everything's already set up to plug in, I'll use that, you know, because it's easier. So what are they I guess we haven't explained what a frequency generator is. But it's a box that you can output waveforms, at frequencies with different amplitudes and offsets. And it might be because this one was $40 on eBay, but I can never get it to output what I wanted to output on the first try. It's probably also because I don't know how to adjust it really. So but what I ended up doing is plugging it directly into my oscilloscope, and then tune the frequency generator to make the waveform I wanted to make before pumping that into my circuit. That totally works. Yeah, it works. It's just like, I should be able to like read the readout and read while I'm setting knobs to but it's probably not calibrated or anything like that anymore. Yeah, frequency generators, I've found like that you sort of they're sort of like two worlds a frequency generator, you have the low end stuff that is like pretty manual, where you have to like just turn knobs and look around the scope to find what you get. And then then there's like the high end of frequency generators, where like everything is super digital and super nice. And you just click a couple buttons and you get exactly what you want. But with those, you're spending so much money to get all of that feature set that the only people who are really going to have that or spend that money, other people know they need that. Okay, so probably don't need a frequency generator unless you need one. Right? It's the rules. They're very good if you need to, like sweeps, if you need to measure, like the output of a of a filter. And so you know, you can just sweep the input and then measure output with your oscilloscope and then you can you get your response. Yeah, if you want to find your 3d be cut off point you can do that. Exactly. actually hit this is a good point for somebody who's say fresh. If you could spend your money on a good power supply, and a good oscilloscope, you can then find boatloads of projects online of people making frequency generators with like Arduinos and DDS chips, at just build your own as a project. And then you can use those other two things to actually build your project. And then you can make a frequency generator. Like I've seen frequency generators that are Arduino based that go out to a megahertz and allow multiple different waveforms and they're inexpensive and you get the fun of building your shelf. So honestly, I would go that route.

Okay, so the opposite of a frequency generator, frequency counter. So this is I actually do not own one of these. And I had to look up what these do. Because I'm like, why what makes it different from like an oscilloscope. So you don't actually this the name poll counter is a little bit misleading. It's it's a Pulse Counter, right? Polls counter or a period counter. Like you're not counting the frequency Z? I don't know. I don't know. They're just a little goofy. So I do have one of these. And it's okay, so funny enough. I have one. It's not fantastic, but I use it on occasion. It's on topic. You're one of your scopes, isn't it? Well, I took it to work actually. So So with actually, funnily enough with our frequency generators, or our pulse generators or our oscilloscope, oscillators that we do, I'll do heat testing on them. So I'll put them inside of a big styrofoam box, and I'll pump heat into them, let them cook for, you know, some period of time for it to lead to the thermally, like rest. And I'll use my frequency counter to see how much the frequency has drifted in time. That that is my one use that I've ever really used the frequency counter for. There's plenty of other uses. But frankly, like I've never run into the need other than what I just discussed, since we do oscillators, and we do a lot of like actual tuning. I use them for that. But I only use them that way from the engineering side, I would never use a frequency counter in our test departments, because they're way too slow. I have other methods for that. Yeah. So yeah, I wouldn't nowadays is something that you just don't really use anymore.

So, but there. So if you if you need if you know you need to use one, go get one. But this one, though, some everyone should have, I think,

Oh, this is probably the first thing other than a power supply. Yeah, first thing other than power slide maybe, is a multimeter. So there's two different types of multimeters. Well, it's probably actually more than two. But for the sake of this podcast, there's two, there's benchtop and handhelds. If it's if you're going to only buy one multimeter get a handheld one, because that way you can carry it around with you. The second one you buy is a benchtop. There's there is a third type that I'm actually going to call out. That is rare, but it does exist. And that is a piggyback type for your oscilloscope. And I'm not talking about like the internal to the oscilloscope. But HP used to make these or startech used to make them where is it was a multimeter that sits on top my scope has that. And it's a fully separate module, it does display on the screen. But it's not like it's reading the wave, you actually plug in probes to it. And I know some other meters do that too. So, but it's rare, and I doubt you're gonna run into that. So this is why your second scope or your second multimeter is a benchtop. And it's actually fab you just said in Twitch chat is it's harder for your colleagues to steal from your desk that's plugged in. That's a lot harder. It's also it's there's something about having a bigger screen. And they usually have more features. They're faster. They update faster. They do in general, they tend to to have more digits. In general. Yeah. Speaking of that, four and a half is gonna be plenty for you out there. Four and a half digit combined. You don't need an eight and a half. No. I was looking at an eight and a half. Earlier today that starts at $12,000. And, I mean, I was laughing pretty hard after it was awesome. Four and a half would be it's gonna be good for 99% of projects out there. But yeah, the actually the best thing about having a, a benchtop is never having to replace the batteries. Because whenever you need to go use your meter. If you left it on, and it the batteries are drained. You know. Go ahead, go ahead, go. Oh, there's one other feature that's in relation to replacing something that benchtops I think are superior. If for whatever reason you pop a fuse on a benchtop typically replacing the fuse is right on the front. There's usually like an unscrew thing and you just pop them in. Whereas in a handheld you have to pull the whole rubber boot off the whole thing apart and yeah. For benchtop I've used two different brands. I've used a siglent four and a half and five and a half digits and then we three we use the keathley before that was really that was a really nice meter. That was on loan No. And then what is that orange and gray one that we we use that one? Gosh, well, that was an Amazon special. Amazon's special. You can still get him have a back She's bright screen. I really liked that. meter that's like actually really good meter for doing what we normally do you get the fab actually, like, you know, testing validation stuff. Let me look it up real quick. So it will pop up you just type in benchtop multimeter probably. But there's a couple of new ones out there that are benchtops now that are like in that. Oh, it was Tenma Tenma Bran. Apparently they make a much like a crazy like 40,000 count four and a half digit one. It's not $100 range though.

No, no. But they've got a oh, this is what this is what you get the electrical engineer

in your life for Christmas. dual display Digital Multimeter LCD wireless speaker plus clock. It's an alarm clock. That's a multimeter Oh, Parker and I saw just the other week. What is it floral Fleur? Now has a thing. It's melior FLIR My bad. Yeah. Has a multimeter available that has a full color IR camera screen on it, too. I'm really close to buying that it's $699. So it's not for automotive use that thing? Awesome. It Yeah, like just to be able to click it on, although I read some of the reviews on it. And people are like, like, it just ghazals double A batteries. Yeah, they have a version that's rechargeable. So I would go with rechargeable, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Because apparently, like, if you're running that camera, it has like, I don't know, something like four hours of use without the camera. And with the camera. It's like one hour or something like that. So on that. We're just talking about a professional brand. Fluke is the, quote, yellow standard, unquote, and multimeters for handheld at least. And why? When should you buy a fluke? Because for home gamers don't buy fluke, by a fluke, when it's your job. by fluke, when it's your job by a fluke when you're doing work for clients, and they're antsy about stuff and they want to see like that you're in control and that you got things taken care of by a fluke, if you want to get it regularly calibrated. And you can because everyone does fluke, you can send it anywhere and you know, they'll be able to do it easily. By a fluke, if you want something that lasts a very, very long time. I mean, there's a lot of reasons to buy a fluke. Yeah. Mainly individuals don't buy flukes. Is companies by flukes? So yeah, and if you're gonna buy a fluke expect to drop, you know, I don't know, let's say 500 bucks. Yeah. Which is fine. I mean, I'm looking at at $600. FLIR ONE, but that's because it has a thermal camera. So great. That'd be so nice to use for car stuff. So yeah, I would say 300 bucks for benchtop 350 ish for a decent benchtop. And then for a handheld. This is a thing with a handheld. You're going to drop it

and i i personally, we've said this a couple times on this podcast already, but I personally use a $20 multimeter from Harbor Freight harbor for actually mines from RadioShack Oh, wow. But you can still buy this version. And the thing about this, this this multimeter I have dropped it off a dock into water. I had dropped it into sand. I've had like, you cannot kill this $20 multimeter it still works. Still works great.

What I what I give it to anyone and have them use it? No. I would if I had a fluke I would let someone else borrow that. But I it's more like I trust myself enough to use this $20 piece of equipment. I wouldn't trust anyone else to use it though. So on that features for multimeters. Try to avoid auto arranging if you can. The great thing about benchtops is they usually have auto arranging and they have ranges that you could set for like your measurements. So you can either auto arrange it or you could set the range automatically or manually, I should say which is great when you need to catch fast measurements. Whereas handhelds you either get one or the other. They usually don't have Have both built in. So you either get auto ranging or you get manual, I would pick manual for a handheld. That's just my preference. So I just can't stand waiting there for to figure out the range. Now, newer meters are much faster in that regard and that kind of stuff, but the oldest one. In the past, it's been pretty brutal how long it takes, especially if you do want by at least a random box from, you know, the big orange store or whatnot. Yep, yep. So, I do need to get a new handheld. So I worked a job previously where we had a fluke 289, which is a little bit of their higher grade stuff. And this one had some really nice features on it, including internal memory. So we were able to do data logging on it. And it was fantastic. For some units, we had had intermittent failures that would happen once an hour kind of thing. And we'd let them run all night long and have this thing chug data logging through, and then we could download it, see what happened at the, you know, at those events. That was really nice. It's, that's another situation though, where it's like, if you need it, you know, you need it, and then you'll go and buy that kind of thing. But, but yeah, so the meter is the one place where I might just arbitrarily spend more money. Whereas, you know, with a lot of these other things, we were saying, like, if you just avoid these features, you can save money. The Meteor is where it's like, I don't know, I'd put extra money into a meter. Yeah, I think it's I think it's going to be, well, I'm gonna hold off on this thing, but because that's like, my, the last question I have is, What is the most important piece of equipment in this list? Yeah. So that's kind of a spoiler, I guess, maybe, maybe not a one other feature, I would go for fine. A meter that has true RMS. So it's actually your AC measurements are calculating RMS. And that that's important. Next thing, digital logic analyzer. And this is like the inverse of oscilloscope for Steven and I, I think these are four, four digital circuits is probably one of the most important tools you could have. Mainly, because a lot of times you need to capture a lot of data, and analyze the actual ones and zeros of what you're outputting, or what you're inputting into, like an a microcontroller or something like that. And a lot, the great thing about the newer ones, they do auto decoding, so you can give it like what your your standard, like if it's a serial protocol, you can give it this is the baud rate. And this is the handshaking, you know, part and it will automatically decode it for you. So that's, I mean, it's, it's kind of amazing what modern DLs can do. So I always highly recommend them, depending on what you're, what you're doing and what kind of what industry you're in in terms of electrical engineer, because you can do lots of engineering. It's such a huge broad term of what you can be doing. And the difference between the oscilloscope and a DLA there's both depending on what you're designing. One is more important than the other. But they also crossover a bit. They do crossover a bit. There are delays that have analog front ends that you can breed analog signals off of. And then there's there's oscilloscope set have that have built into them. Yeah, yeah, those are a mixed signal oscilloscope.

And yeah, I mean, yeah, I've seen some scopes that also have frequency counters and frequency generators built into them. They're, they're trying to be the all in one thing. For DLA, I would say saline is kind of like the golden standard. I want to say that's out there. I think it's saili I don't remember how to spell that. It's a L EA. Yeah. Is that it? Yeah, S A L E A E. Okay. But for the longest time when I was in college, the only thing I could afford was a open bench logic analyzer. And man i i built a lot of circuits and debug a lot of stuff with that $50 dla but now you can get like The $50 delays you get now are amazing. So yeah, I mean, the delay I have, I think I paid 100 something for it. And this was just a few years back. And it's, for, for all intents and purposes, it's as good as insanely we had it macro fab. It might not be as like, crisp and not in an aluminum package. But it does all the does all the features on the features. The big thing on delays, is the, the front end setup on them, and not just like how fast what the bandwidth is how much what's the fastest signal you can capture with it. But it's really my opinion is how much front end protection does the DLA have, because like it's a scope, you can pretty much plug a scope probe into like practically anything, and it's gonna be fine. For 99.99% of logical engineers on your bench, that's gonna be fine. Because like they have like, what 600 Most of them are 600 volt front ends, and super high impedance. So there's no current code going into there. Now, I think there's like, like 50 Ohm scopes, you can get stuff like that, but that's, that's a completely different ballgame. Now, DLA a lot of them are like six volt tolerance. So you got to be you have to be a little careful where you're gonna plug this thing into but even something like the super fast ones are like 3.3 volt tolerant, like they're not designed to do you know, Arduino level stuff, which is five volt tolerant, right? You gotta pay attention to that with a DLA bei if you're going to be doing, like, if you're going to do IoT stuff, and that was it. Don't forget it. So scope. Get get DLA. Yeah. Unless you unless like your whatever your IoT thing is like, say it's an IoT function generator. And you have to make sure you capture that like, that's, yeah, just get a DLA. Yep. Okay, next thing, active loads. These are nice. So we're starting to get to the nice to haves, I guess, frequency generator. And counters are nice to haves if you have a purpose for them. But I would say an active load is really useful when you're starting to design power supplies on your, on your boards. And you're designing topographies that maybe you haven't designed before, or you're doing sub circuit design. So like you're designing your power supplies separately from like the rest of your low level logic on your board. And so like you need to bring up the let's say, a switch mode, bring up a switchboard for the first time, instead of it pumping, it's what maybe could be 3.3 volts into your your hundreds of dollars of other circuitry, maybe you should have it separated, and then actually load it up with a test load to make sure it's functioning properly. So that's what active load would be used for. Yeah, it's a it's basically a constant current load or sync. Yeah. And the, what's nice about them is you can characterize your power supplies across load using them. So for switch modes, that's great for, you know, turning on with particular loads, and seeing what your response is, or seeing your noise across load or ripple across load. They're also really nice for determining battery discharge.

Oh, yeah, constant. Currently, I forgot about that. So if you're dealing with battery circuits, they're they're extremely useful in that sense. But but we are we are starting to get into the like, well, if you're designing this, then this is a good tool for it.

I mean, I guess we've been sort of talking about the entire time. Yeah, I like active loads a lot. Um, that's what I use them for is,

is bringing up sub circuits and power supplies and that kind of stuff. One downfall to keep in mind with active loads is sometimes they only accept positive voltage. They Oh, yeah. They don't just act as like a variable resistor for anything you dump onto it. So keep that in mind. You can cause damage to them if you reverse bias them. Yeah. Because usually they're there. It's a MOSFET basically, and it's been driven into linear mode, basically. Correct. Yeah. And it has like a nice fancy feedback circuit inside that keeps it where it needs to be. So just reference whatever manual or If you do need it, you know, a constant current for an AC load. Keep that in mind. Yeah. And I would say brand wise. I mean, if this is your home gamer, I would just buy, you know, 50 $60, one that can handle what you need to test on like Amazon or whatever. It's not too big of a deal. Is this not something you'll be using everyday? Anyways? Yeah, I guess the only thing to keep in mind with that, I mean, sure, I think the 50 to 60, or one probably will get by, especially if you're just doing like LiPo battery discharge or something like that. But just keep in mind what your expected design is going to be dumping into this thing, because the way active loads work is they just get rid of it as heat? So you have to you have to know how much you're cranking into it. Yep. No, as I said, you got to know how much you're going to be dumping right. Okay, our else LC meters, which are different than multimeters. Many, because they only have the RLC, resistance inductance and capacitance, right, right. But they tend to be more accurate than a multimeter would be at measuring nose, well, maybe not resistance, but definitely better at inductance. And capacitance. Well, like, you know, if you look at impedance charts of a capacitor, it's it's all over the place based off of a bunch of characteristics RLC meters will let you identify things of that for it, like where a lot of frequency are you measuring it, yeah, you can set the measurement, the frequency, you can set some of them, you can set the voltage, you testing that, which is that would actually be very important for capacitance is measuring at a specific voltage, what the capacitance is, yeah, we had a, we had one at my first job that we paid $17,000 for. And it was awesome. It was so great. Well, the thing was, we were developing vibration sensing probes. So it has a coil inside of a metal body, and then the extending off that body is coaxial cable, that is a handful of meters long. And that connects to the front end of a device that has a an oscillator in it. And that oscillator is tuned to the impedance of the cable and the coil at the end of this entire cable. And the whole purpose is to change your Rs and your C's in your oscillator on the front end, in order to resonate with the cable and the coil at one megahertz is the frequency we chose when we have this RLC meter because we could we could test every aspect of the entire system with that RLC. And we could do sweeps across it and see everything. So in situations like that it was it was very, very useful to be able to have a very specific meter like that, as opposed to like a handheld meter that's like, Yep, it's a nano farad or Yep, it's a micro Henry or whatever. Like it, that's not enough most of the time, when you're when you're deep in the weeds, like in that situation I gave there. Yeah, so 99% of the time though, like if you're a home gamer, you don't need this. However, there are some some little boxes that you can buy on Amazon and tweezers to Well, yeah, tweezers, tweezers that do this as well for for SMT stuff. But but there's these little test boxes that you can buy for 20 bucks or less, that just has a little zip socket that you can plug capacitors, inductors transistors all kinds of stuff into and you just press a button and it gives you a good ballpark number of what it is. So they're really fantastic for that time that you spill all your capacitors on the ground. And you're like oh my god, you know what I'm talking about right? Oh yeah, welcome in and you find out what it is and some of them have little surface mount pads that you can press a surface mount Parktown on. Exactly. Exactly. So if you're like home gamer wanting to throw together a little shop an extra 20 bucks for one of those things is awesome. But if you're getting into like building solenoids or doing any kind of coils or any kind of magnetic sensing or anything like that then a better RLC meters probably valuable to you about

I probably guess is a little long but assessories main thing on this kind of equipment is having good cables. I good bad cables. One are not that expensive anymore. And two good probes are not that expensive anymore either. Get like there's like a link on Amazon that Steve and I always like you can get like the crappiest multimeter but the thing is also going to have really bad probes awful probes. Pair pair a like 60 to $70 handheld multimeter with like the This $10 pair of probes it's awesome. Yeah, we both been buying these probes for years now. And these probes are are great. They're super sharp. They got long, super sharp, long probe tips on them. And they're awesome for like, you can probe and oh, 402 component. Easy. No problem. Yeah. But the great thing about it is they're super sharp. And they're, I think they're like seven bucks or something like that. Now, they're so cheap. And so once you bend the tips up, then you can just go get a new pair. Now, there was something like, last time we talked about this. I said I was going to try them and never tried them. I have a pair of a tip covers from tag Connect. That have apparently it's got like, you know, like a pogo pin that's got like a serrated edges like brown. Yeah, it's like that for your tip. So you don't slip. But at least theory. It's bigger. Well, it's a crown. Yeah, tip. Let me see one final quick. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm trying to think of what this situation you would really need it for is, I guess it okay. So if you're working, if you're working like a high voltage situation where you don't want to slip for any reason, that would be a good reason for it. So I bought them and never opened up the backend. Yeah, I see it. And must have been like two years more bad more than it was before COVID. That I said, I was gonna buy these and try them out. bought them never tried them out. But I think they have the cold, no slip, no slip meter probes. And they're like tips for the ends of normal probes basically. Did they just slide over? A normal? Yeah, they slide over your normal meter? probes? Yeah. So there's a magnified picture here. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's just got some little grippy fingers or some Yeah, prong things on the end.

No, yeah. So it's got like, three. It's like a crown. I should take a picture underneath the microscope.

Yeah. Have one of these? Yeah, that's good. And see how well they work? Because I

completely forgot I bought them. So I wonder if they'll fit on the $7 pair

of maybe not, because those are really long and sharp. Yeah, they might be. They might be expecting the regular like two millimeter. Almost blunt guys. Yeah, maybe give it a shot. Maybe they'll be awesome. Now we'll be like, the relevation of the next revelation. What was that? The next step up? Yes, that's sure. Oh, okay. So the question that I spoiled earlier, what is the most important piece of equipment that you think on this list? I think we can agree. There's one and two. And they're both very close. Well, one is more, let's Okay, let's take power supply out of the equation, because the power supply is just you, you have to have it. None of the other things matter if you don't have a power supply. So I would say multimeter is number one, I would agree with that. And then number two, like in the same shopping cart is blood power supply. Okay, yeah, I see. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. If you have a multimeter and a power supply, you can do almost everything. Almost everything. Yeah, yeah. And and like all the all the like digital stuff that you would need or oscilloscope, you would need for analog stuff. If you're willing to just like really chug through and beat your head on a table, you there's a chance you could solve it without those things. Those things might make solving it easier. But like, you know, say you're a student and you have some kind of a project you're working on for a class, something or other, you could probably get by without those things, and just figure it out. In fact, it might even be better for you if you if you had to figure out if you suffered but yeah, I would agree with you a good multimeter and a good power supply is a good place to start. That's what I would start and then do some projects and then figure out if you want to either go oscilloscope or delay next, just think of like what problems you ran into and be like, would this have been solved with a DLA easier or would have been solved with a scope easier? And then pick Pick after that, I would not be surprised if almost everyone goes DLA just because I feel like just the way electronics is nowadays, a delay is so much more useful than a scope, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Again, it depends on what I mean a lot of people know that getting electronics or building like stomp boxes and stuff like that. And a scope is gonna be so much better at diagnosing what's going on with a stop box. Oh, it's infinitely more infinitely better than DLA. But But I guess the well okay to just kind of pick on the IoT again. You know, how many people are building stop boxes versus how many people are building IoT whatever's I guess, I guess I'm just saying like, yeah, for the stomp box guys. Scope was invaluable if you are doing Arduino stuff, a delay is probably gonna be much better for you than a oscilloscope. Right? Right. The problem is those oscilloscope just look cool. You can turn them on and just impress your friends. I get really dorky friends, you can impress your college. I'd plug I've turned it on and then like put the probes on like the calibration thing. The one killer hurt. You know, one volt peak peak wave. Oh, yeah, it just let that let that sit in like the corner of the room or during the party. Just let it cook. Yeah. Wow, that's dorky. You would do the same thing. Actually. My my girlfriend right out of college. I remember I had a frequency generator, an oscilloscope. And I plugged it in. And she's like, what is that? And I just gave her a basic like, this is what it is. And she's like, Can I play with it? And she sat there for like an hour. Just like playing around with the scope and frequency. she overheard someone's thing ever. Exactly. See? Yeah. Okay, let's wrap up this podcast. Oh, and so one more thing next week Star Wars podcasts. You know, let's try to get more people in our live stream for us. Oh, yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah, be a lot of fun. So that was the macro engineering podcast we're your hosts Parker Dolman and Steven Gregg later everyone take it

easy everyone, sir, bring back this outro because before the podcast we started recording and Steve and I talked about writing a new intro. And so we're going to start doing the outro again. So that was Oh no, that's that. I've read the wrong thing didn't I? Thank you. Yes, you our listener for downloading our podcast if you have a cool idea project or topic, let's do it and I know Tweet us at Mac Feb at Longhorn engineer with no O's or at analog E and G or emails at podcasts at macro app.com. Also check out our Slack channel it is Mac fab.com/slack And check out our live stream which is six o'clock central time Tuesdays at twitch.tv/macro Fab