My Overflowing Workbench

I’ve had to put aside my home electronics activities for a long time due to nearly losing my eyesight several years ago.  While things are better for me now, it’s high time I took advantage of my long-time love of electronics and technology.  This is my workbench.  It’s cluttered but before I cleaned it for a house inspection, it was much worse.

Tools.  The small box at the lower left had the cabling tools I used at SATV.

Some of my test equipment.  You may have seen the small Triplett DMM on my workbench.  Here is a decibel meter, a Kill-A-Watt, and in the reused Norelco pouch, a Bus Pirate (a very useful tool for connecting to serial buses.)

And I have a scope cart.

The scope and frequency counter work—the scope is a HP 1722 with good 275 MHz bandwidth.  The counter only does 60 MHz so I’ll need a new one for my ham radio work.  (Someday)  The DMM at the bottom is a sick HP 3440—it has a broken switch in the signal path, but I do expect it to be fixable.

A collection of microcontroller development kits.  One Z8 Encore I played with and bought at ESC some years ago, and three MSP 430’s, one of which is a wireless module.

I never had time to really use them.  I really got into the Z8, but when I looked into getting a network stack for it I had sticker shock.  I could really use a Ethernet module such as the Spinneret Web Server coupled with an cheap GPS module.  SATV has wanted a GPS NTP source for a very long time.  I’d like to be able to get the Ethernet and controller for less than $50 with a network stack and a toolchain (compiler/linker/debugger) that goes well with my Windows background. 

I even have a “new” 12V worklight, of sorts:

It’s the lamp from one of my old broken scanners.  It works.  The hardest part will be building an enclosure.  I never have enough lights.

I’m just glad to be tinkering again.

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