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.