Workbench
Summary of Project
Constructed out of plywood, and 2×4s, my workbench is a 4′x8′ table piled high with storage drawers, parts drawers, and equipment. On one side is my main computer and work station, Gojira, and on the other is my power supply, and multimeters and soldering equipment. This affords me a great place to work and play with electronics and homework and radio stuff.
Type of Project
Personal
Current Status
In progress
Goal
Construct and stock a workbench so that I may work on projects and always have all of my parts, tools and computer available nearby. I also wanted all of my test equipment in one spot so I could use them easily without needing to move projects around.
Details
First iteration (Junior Year at Clarkson 2008-2009)
The first workbench I constructed was really rather tiny, crammed in to a spare corner in my dorm room and not very useful, but it was still a good start and saw the beginnings of my serious extra-curricular tinkering. It was a small 2′ x 4′ table that later became part of iteration 3 of the workbench. On the bottom shelf I stored my plastic bins full of components (currently being phased out due to a larger collection and having more room to properly sort it) as well as miscellaneous equipment. On the top shelf the area directly accessible by a chair was the workspace (one project at a time!) and to it’s right all of my then meager collection of test equipment was stacked. Despite my worries this never collapsed as I thought it would!
Here is a photo of that workbench:
Iteration 1
Second iteration (Summer 2009)
The summer after Junior Year I took an internship job at AIS in Rome, NY. With a small apartment to call my own and an actual paycheck I built a new workbench. The lumber for Iteration 1 was stored in Potsdam still, so I started from scratch here. This workbench is a 4′ x 8′ table with a hutch for my equipment, and a simple desk butted up against it to hold my computer in a small 90 degree wraparound work area. The hutch idea worked out poorly and was later abandoned. Also, by this point I had amassed a modest collection of cables and probes and such, so I strung up a hook on one wall to hold them. This was a step in the right direction as I had more room to spread out and started and completed several smaller test projects over the summer to get a feel for some of the bigger things I wanted to take on. While flawed this bench does influence my third iteration heavily, and in that version I feel I’ve almost corrected all the major problems.
Here are some photos of that workbench:
Iteration 2 - Left View
Iteration 2 - Right View
Please excuse the messiness, it was very much a cramped living space, hence the hot dog buns, I was getting ready to eat!
Third and current iteration (Senior Year at Clarkson 2009-2010)
This is my current workbench. It’s the same table as Iteration 2, but Greg Linder helped my reassemble the table a little differently, using a stabilizing cross-beam along the back legs as well as adjusting the reinforcing beams under the table surfaces. Also, the shelves from Iteration 1 became raised platforms to stack all of my equipment and computers on. Now the workbench is a little less spacious than Iteration 2, but considerably more efficient to use. Also the cable hook has been turned in to two cable hooks to accomodate my much more substantial collection of cables and probes.
Here are the photos:
Iteration 3 - SPEED Radio Work Session
Iteration 3 - SPEED Radio Work Session
Iteration 3 - Somewhat clean
As you can see in the third (latest taken) photo the oscilloscope is gone, and I have a lot of drawers in it’s place. That scope you may notice is different from the first two iterations, and it will explained below in the equipment section. Also, the current workbench replaced my aging 19″ ViewSonic LCD with a new ASuSTeK 24″ LCD.
Equipment
Data Precision DP-3500 Multimeter
My first bench top multimeter, I bought this off an old classmate for $20 when I built my first workbench. It’s a tank and it works wonderfully. Autoranging for DC voltage, AC voltage, resistance and a mode that measures gain between two voltage nodes. I use it often to monitor the output of my supply when I’m actively testing live projects, or as a continuity meter when I’m constructing things. It’s also handy for probing out pinouts for obscure parts. It doesn’t have a continuity beep, but it has a very distinct relay clicking sound it makes when you close a circuit as it autoranges down to the lowest one. I personally enjoy the sound of relays clicking to a beep any day!
Keithley 179 Digital Multimeter
This is technically my third bench top multimeter but the second one never worked, so this is my second functioning one. This was a gift from Greg Linder while he was cleaning out his apartment, he didn’t need it and I was looking to have a second one. The banana ports on it are loose, but I think I can open it up and crimp them down again to make them work better. Other than that it’s perfectly functional, you just need to hold the probes in to the ports. It does all the usual amenities plus current which my Data Precision doesn’t do. Though realistically I never measure current directly, a shunt resistor us my usual method which just needs a good DC voltmeter.
Protek PT-3502 Oscilloscope (Failed)
This was my first oscilloscope. My roommate picked it up for me and I paid him back ($60) at a surplus store in New Hampshire. It was a 20MHz CRT with a crack around the outer bezel. It worked perfectly fine though and it was a great addition to my workbench, serving as a good debugging tool, and a very very poor logic analyzer. It didn’t come with probes or a power cable, but the probes I got on eBay for cheap, and the power cord was a standard PC power cord of which we have several lying around. Unfortunately it suddenly and silently died over the Summer of 2009, on Iteration 2 of the work bench. It was a replaced by a loaned Tektronix 2213 from Greg Linder.
Tektronix 2213 Oscilloscope (Borrowed, returned to owner)
This was the scope Greg loaned me upon returning to school in August 2009. This was a form of upgrade to 60MHz from my old 20MHz scope but otherwise much the same. I used it to debug the PWM channels I’d devised for Senior lab as well as to test function generator kits for K2CC. Also, it was involved in an adventure involving 110VAC, some miscommunication, and some sparks! This scope served me well until November of that year when I returned it to Greg when he moved to Denver. It was later replaced by my first ‘modern’ oscilloscope, the Link Instruments MSO-19.
Link Instruments MSO-19 USB Oscilloscope/Logic Analyzer
I got this as a gift for this past Christmas, it is a 2Gsa/s single channel oscilloscope, as well as an 8-channel 200Msa/s Logic Analyzer. Thus this device is a MSO, or Mixed-signal Oscilloscope. So far it’s been instrumental in my work on my Audio Mixer and the Logic Analyzer has helped me debug a couple micro-controller projects. I haven’t used it quite as much as I wanted because of my busy academic schedule, but it’s definitely proven itself very effective. The only issue I’ve had is with it’s unsigned driver on Windows 7 64-bit, which is famous for rejecting unsigned drivers. The company quickly acted when I contacted them and proposed a perfectly valid workaround. I won’t post it here because they have asked customers to contact them for it, but I can definitely vouch for their excellent support and response time.
HP 6253A Power Supply
This old warhorse is the power source for many of my projects. It has two adjustable voltage/current DC power supplies, allowing control from 0 to 20V, supplying 0 to 3A on each internal supply. I got it dirt cheap on eBay as it was ‘broken’, but I’ve been fixing it on and off for the past year. It’s actually perfectly fine, but the adjustment/programming potentiometers on the front were damaged in a drop it seems, and are mostly junk. I got one supply working with some fiddling and a recalibration. The other is still pretty flaky, when I have more time and money I’ll replace all the pots and rotary selectors on the front and it should be back to full function.
CSI Solder Station 2A
Picked this up from CircuitSpecialists.com after using a friends, at only $45 plus shipping, it’s a steal. I’ve used high grade Weller Stations before and this runs with them no problem, at a much lower cost. I’ve used this iron for quite a while and it’s always served me very well. In the interest of not causing damage to the tip, I’ve refrained from using wet sponges and used only slightly coarse clothes to wipe the solder off. This has the advantage of not rapidly cooling and reheating the metal tip over and over, and it’s showing much less wear and tear than any other iron’s I’ve owned, despite being used much more frequently.
Gojira
My primary computer, running Ubuntu 9.04 (updating soon to 9.10) and occasionally some version of Windows, this is where I do all my design (EAGLE) and programming (Eclipse) for my workbench projects. I keep a Windows XP VM around for the occasional app that needs it, like the software for my MSO, and it does everything I need. I don’t play much games anymore besides Tetris so I haven’t had any limitations there. This has an AMD FX-62 dual-core 64-bit processor, clocked at 2GHz, with 2GB of RAM, an nVidia 8600GT and a cadre of hard drives that changes fairly often. The most consistent are the 320GiB OS drive, and the two 500GiB data storage drives for music/movies/etc. For display I have a dual head set up, an ASuS 24″ 1920×1080 paired up with an ASuS 19″ 1440×900. For sound I’m using the onboard chip with an old beat up Altec Lansing 2.1 speaker set.
Plastic Storage Drawers
When Greg Linder moved to Denver, he left behind a nice stack of plastic storage drawers. With a little rough housing we split that in to a stack of small drawers, and big drawers. The small drawers sit up top on the power strip for the test equipment and carry all of my various tools and such in most of it’s drawers. Another holds wire and assorted peripherals and finally the last one holds any in progress projects. The bigger ones on the floor serve as a makeshift home for my external hard drive and a place to put equipment that’s too bulky for the smaller drawers, like the soldering station.
Parts Storage Drawers
Recently, Phil Hart (KC2SGA) donated a stack of component drawers to me, and may be passing an another set soon. I’ve been cleaning them out, relabeling them and cutting up an old USPS box to make dividers for it, and soon will migrate my components in to them from the current plastic storage cases. More on this when it’s completed.