How to arrange my electronic lab

[mkl0815]

I hope not to start a "long running" philosophical discussion here. But after hard negotiations I've got the approval to create my small electronic lab in our boiler room. Ok, its mostly rearranging all the stuff that is already there and sorting out stuff that is not needed anymore (is this really possible?? )
Maybe I'm also able to silently add some new toys ...

What I want to ask for is how to arrange the following things on a 160cm x 80cm desk with the ability to add shelf on the back wall over the desk.

I own the following things:

- soldering station
- digital oscilloscope
- lab power supply
- logic analyzer that needs to be connected via USB to my old 2008 MacBook Air
- all the tools like pliers, screwdrivers, etc.

I'm a left-hander, so the soldering station need to be on the left side of the desk.

I don't want to end like this: http://www.mikrocontroller.net/attachme ... b_2007.jpg, so I need some best practice advices from our "old dogs".

Mario.

[GARTHWILSON]

mkl0815 wrote:

I don't want to end like this:



so I need some best practice advices from our "old dogs".

Wow, and I thought my workbench was bad!

[Dr Jefyll]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Wow, and I thought my workbench was bad!

Huh? Looks fine to me. My motto is, "A place for everything... and everything all over the place!!"

[GARTHWILSON]

See the office of analog engineer and industry guru Bob Pease, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t513IZ5V9Nk . Unfortunately he died in a car accident in his VW bug a couple of years ago, not using a seat belt. I've kept a lot of his magazine articles. This was a man who despised looking professional so much that when told he had to wear a tie to go see a client, he wore it like a belt, around his waist. I believe he was still using a TRS-80 model 100 "laptop" computer to write articles near the end of his life, and he turned in very sloppily drawn circuits for them. But, who could argue? He was very interesting, humorous, and obviously knew his stuff!

[ChuckT]

My only advice is to have a plan before you buy material because they end up in a junk box before you use it and to get some bins or parts organizers because you can get more room by stacking things vertically.

I don't care where you shop but I went to Wallmart and got one of those large plastic containers usually made for clothes for $7 or $8 that you can shove under the bed. It has a lid and keeps dust out.

A search at Kmart dot com using the search words "small parts organizer drawers" found 114 products.

This deal was the best I found:

Stack-On 60-Drawer Storage Cabinet Kmart Item# 005W045098511512 | Model# DS60

http://www.kmart.com/stack-on-60-drawer ... ockType=G1

Similar products were more expensive on Amazon.

[whartung]

ChuckT wrote:

A search at Kmart dot com using the search words "small parts organizer drawers" found 114 products.

This deal was the best I found:

Stack-On 60-Drawer Storage Cabinet Kmart Item# 005W045098511512 | Model# DS60

And if you get these things, either put heavy things in them or anchor them so that they don't readily tip. Filled with a bunch of light stuff, they're not particularly stable, easily jostled or tipped. You do not one of these filled up to tip over and dump the drawers on the ground.

Get a labeler as well. Label everything, and relabel them when you repurpose. Post it notes are not labels.

The warehouse on Mythbusters should be an inspiration, since they likely stuff junk in to dark recesses akin to the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, "just in case", "for later".

[Arlet]

Also, use SMD components. I use these little boxes: http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/653914.pdf. Even the little 1x1 size boxes (about the size of 2 sugarcubes) easily hold a few thousand 0603 resistors. There are different sizes, different colors, and they have a tongue and groove system to fit together. You can put the whole standard E12 range of resistors in less than the area of a sheet of paper.

[ChuckT]

whartung wrote:

And if you get these things, either put heavy things in them or anchor them so that they don't readily tip. Filled with a bunch of light stuff, they're not particularly stable, easily jostled or tipped. You do not one of these filled up to tip over and dump the drawers on the ground.

Then you pull a couple of drawers out and screw the unit to a wall or a board anchored to a wall if the material supports it.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

whartung wrote:

And if you get these things, either put heavy things in them or anchor them so that they don't readily tip. Filled with a bunch of light stuff, they're not particularly stable, easily jostled or tipped. You do not one of these filled up to tip over and dump the drawers on the ground.

That must be what happened in that guy's lab.

[GARTHWILSON]

My main workbench is an 8-foot-long folding table. To get more usable front-to-back width, I keep it about 4 inches (10cm) away from the wall, and the oscilloscopes and other instruments hang off the back a bit, as do the parts cabinets with all the little drawers. These are all quite a bit wider than 4", so they cannot fall behind. The stacked parts cabinets lean back a bit against the wall, making them less likely to tip over forward in our occasional southern-California earthquakes. I have six more cabinets underneath, on the floor, 240 little drawers, holding my primary resistor inventory, plus another cabinet of other less-accessed parts. I fastened a power outlet strip with 16 outlets to the underside of the table, back toward the wall, keeping power cords mostly out of the way and not very visible. (The excess power cord length for the various instruments is wound around the table legs to keep the cords from being in the way of accessing the parts cabinets.) My tool box is a fishing tackle box and it stays on the floor beside my feet. More parts are in the closet, some in cabinets with more little drawers and some in boxes. My primary inventory of ICs is in tubes and in IC books (see http://itoienterprises.com/ and click on "product gallery" then "ChipSafe") on the shelves above the workbench. I have more ICs in tubes in the closet and in the garage. (When you have hundreds of one type, there's no need to have them all near the workbench. I have many thousands of ICs here altogether.) If you are given limited floor space, make maximum use of vertical space. Besides the many little cabinets under the workbench, put strong shelving above the workbench anchored to the wall. Some things do not need to be accessed frequently. Those can go near the ceiling (which is 10 feet high in my case).

[mkl0815]

Thanks for the responses, I've just returned from the local hardware store with everything needed to build two shelfs on the back wall of my workbench, to mount some tools on the wall too and little boxes to sort some things. I had already bought a small cabinet placed beside my workbench waiting to be filled with all the paper boxes with the presorted bigger objects like lcd-displays, sensors, shields for the arduino etc.
The system for the shelf is flexible, so I can easily rearrange both shelf-floors, because they have different widths and I have to try out the best arrangement.
If you all are interested, I'll keep you updated even with some photos.

Thanks for the hint with the SMD boxes, but I live in Germany and it would be hard to get those boxes for a reasonable price here I think. But in fact that I'm related to mice and rats, I'm really thinking about it, because of the "Mouse loo"

Building up vertically is an option, but height is limited, because I have only 1.9 meters from the ground to the ceiling in my basement. But if I will find the strength to sort some things out, I think there is enough room to store everything and still being able to work

Mario.

[whartung]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

My main workbench is an 8-foot-long folding table. To get more usable front-to-back width, I keep it about 4 inches (10cm) away from the wall, and the oscilloscopes and other instruments hang off the back a bit, as do the parts cabinets with all the little drawers.

That's a really clever idea Garth.

I think if I were to do something like that I'd want to have either a solid wall of equipment/drawers across the back, or a lip (say 2"-4" high) in the gaps to keep things from rolling off the back.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

mkl0815 wrote:

Building up vertically is an option, but height is limited, because I have only 1.9 meters from the ground to the ceiling in my basement.

1.9 meters [about 74¾ inches]? That is tight. I hope you aren't too tall.

[Dajgoro]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

mkl0815 wrote:

Building up vertically is an option, but height is limited, because I have only 1.9 meters from the ground to the ceiling in my basement.

1.9 meters [about 74¾ inches]? That is tight. I hope you aren't too tall.

Ouch, my roommate wouldn't fit there!
I always end up taking over the living room, and turning it into a lab.
I don't have proper shelfs either, and I would like to have those, but since I keep moving back and forth when the summer break comes it is a bit unpractical.

[scotws]

Two years ago, I had the chance to completely rebuild our study from scratch, starting with the bare concrete floor and naked walls (if anybody is curious, there is journal on my wife's blog starting at http://wsdha.de/2011/09/06/ein-arbeitsz ... r-geschah/).

What has worked great are hooks for cables on the wall so you can hang them there instead of putting them into a box where they get tangled by some sort of strange variant of brownian motion. In fact, since then I've put up two rows of coat pegs just outside the door in the hall for power cords and whatnot. You can probably find a place to hang them from the ceiling, too.

Mario, is humidity a problem in the boiler room? I'd be interested in pictures, too, of course ...