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  • Author Author: kmikemoo
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New Tools (and toys)

kmikemoo

imageThank you element14 and  !  These arrived earlier in the week but I held off opening them until Saturday - when I could enjoy the process a bit more.  It was then that it hit me that I had at least one more task to complete... now I have to clean off my workbench so I have room for these. Laughing

Clearly, I haven't done that yet.  Yes... I could be procrastinating.

I'm actually quite excited to try out the hot air rework station - as I have never used one before.  The closest I've come was a plastic welding kit.  I'm sure that I'll have no problem finding boards in the electrionics recycling bin at work to practice my developing skills.

I also broke the rules when it comes to the arbitrary waveform generator.  I read (some of) the manual.  And while it might be smarter than I am right now, I have a friend who is brilliant with electronics that can help me learn to use all of the features of this generator.  I'm looking forward to checking out some RF filters, a mixer and a phase detection module that I bought... on a whim.  More for the list.   Confess your impulse purchases! 
I do need to buy some BNC to SMA adapters now.  And... I hope I don't blow up my TinySA.  My oscilloscopes don't go as high as this waveform generator does.

Again, thank you e14 and Schneider Electric for letting me participate in the Experimenting with Industrial Automation Design Challenge.  And thank you to  and  for judging - not an easy task but always appreciated.

  • Nice haul for an exceptional project. It is always a great day when you add something significant to the bench.

    For my hot air station I always just use the smallest nozzle. The controls allow adjustment of temperature and flow rate but the small nozzle makes it a bit easier to control where all the heat is going.

  • Well earned, I hope you have lots of fun with the new toys.

  • Hi Mike,

    Congratulations on your winning entry and your cool new tools!  There is always a learning curve when starting out with new tools.  I am sure that you will figure it all out with time.

    Enjoy!

  • Hi Mike,

    Congrats on the win! It's great to see the equipment. I'm interested to hear how it goes with the hot-air tool, for ages, that model was on my shortlist to buy, although it wasn't in stock at the time and I ended up with a different one.

    The waveform generator capabilities look impressive too; even suitable for 2m band tests!
    Since the SA will be so sensitive, you could add an external attenuator to the input of the SA, just for a bit of added protection. Something like a 10 dB attenuator is not bad to keep permanently attached to the SA input. Often I leave that connected even if working with small signals, just in case there's accidentally a larger signal at a frequency that I'm not looking at.