ECE workbench

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The ECE Workbench is a station inside Splatspace for hand-soldering, wiring, programming and debugging electrical and computer engineering projects. It is separate from the surface mount solder station.

Contents

Current Supplies

Pun intended.

Tools

An OKI soldering iron with screwdriver tip and a RadioShack iron with conical tip are dedicated to the ECE bench. The RS iron has digital temperature control with presets and was donated by User:Petesoper.

Multimeter

A RSR MY64 Multimeter was donated by User:Cov to be used at Splat Space.

Programmer and Debugger

The Bus Pirate can serve as a versatile programming and debugging tool. User:Cov donated this item.

Benchtop Power Supplies

We currently have a 13.8V 10A regulated power supply with a "cigarette lighter socket" and a regulated 0-30V, 0-5A bench supply. Two "indestructible" regulators are being built by User:Petesoper to derive 5V @ 5A and 3.3V @ 1A from the 13.8V supply.

13.8V 10A benchtop power supply
Adjustable DC benchtop power supply

Works in Progress

The following components of the work station are being worked on to become fully usable.

Computing Station

A computer with with support for all the tools pre-installed and pre-configured (to the extent possible) would be handy. User:Cov has donated a laptop and monitor. Some contents of the hard drive need to be archived prior to installing Windows (sigh) and Linux. The machine specifications are:

Component Value
Make Toshiba
Model Satellite A105
CPU Intel T2400 @ 1.83GHz
RAM 2GiB
Storage 80gb SATA drive (2gb swap, 30+gb for Windows, 30+gb for Linux)
Video Mobile 945GM Express Integrated Graphics Controller driving separate LCD monitor
Audio ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller
Connectors VGA, USB, SD, SMC, xD, Firewire, S-Video, RJ45 (softmodem), Ethernet, PC Card

Potential Additions

Tools

Basic wiring tools need to be dedicated to the ECE bench, including at least needle nose pliers, diagonal cutters, one or more wire strippers, basic solder removal tools (sucker, wick, flux) etc, together with one or more storage boxes and/or drawers.

Power

A standard PC power supply in combination with a ATX Breakout Board could provide additional regulated supply voltages and it could be the starting point for an alternative implementation (more ripple filtering, higher current limits, exposing the -5V source, adding a 9V source, etc).

An assortment of dongles and adapters will be needed.

Logic Analyzer

The Open Workbench Logic Sniffer may be the perfect intersection of price point and utility for this function.

Oscilloscope

While a PC oscilloscope may be able to reproduce analog signals for a desirable purchase price, finding one with decent Linux compatibility may be a challenge.

The Bus Pirate can be used as an oscilloscope for frequencies at or below 1 kHz.

A JYETech kit might be a good starting point for developing our own cost-effective, Linux-supported PC oscilloscope. It has an analog bandwidth of 1MHz and costs $49.

The Velleman PCSGU250 combines 2-ch 12MHz oscilloscope, baseband spectrum analyser, transient recorder, function generator and bode plotter, and would cost our club $179.00 and would sell to the public for $350.00. Not bad, but not as good a value as we could get, and its proprietary software won't run on Linux or OS X.

Potentially the best value is the BitScope Pocket Analyzer, which combines 100MHz oscilloscope, 40 MSps 8-ch logic analyzer, serial logic and protocol analyzer (SPI, CAN, I2C, UART, and analog), RF and baseband spectrum analyser, arbitary waveform and protocol patterns function generator, and multichannel chart recorder. Its (proprietary?) software works on Windows, desktop Linux distributions, OS X and Android. The device costs $295.

The Digalent Analog Discovery kit combines dual 5 MHz, 50 MSPS, analog inputs, dual 5 MHz, 125 MSPS analog outputs, 2 fixed +/- 4.5 V power supplies and 16 signal 100 MSPS digital I/O. The (proprietary?) software is currently available for Windows with Linux and OS X support "soon" as of 2012-03-24. The price is $149 with academic pricing or $249 otherwise (and only $99 if we can buy one used from a student who qualified for their lowest pricing tier).

Function Generator

Some PC oscilloscopes also have function generation capabilities, but again, Linux support may be difficult.

Frequency Counter

A frequency counter is especially useful when rebuilding old radios (ie. 1950's or earlier), old military equipment, microwave and radar communication devices, broadcast TV and Radio "Marty" equipment, ham radio equipment, and so on. For example, even a digital storage oscilloscope cannot give you the frequency of a signal as accurate as a frequency counter through several stages of pentodes and triodes in an old TV. Some military gear, if not tuned to 1% or better accuracy (an O-scope is good for about a 5% accuracy), you will not get a SSB signal and thus, not get the signal of interest--such as the older marine positioning system.

See Also