floobydust wrote:
A good quality digital multimeter is pretty much a given for doing any design/build work. You should get something that's more flexible, which can measure capacitance and AC/DC current in addition to the usual functions.
The thing about multimeters, though, is that it's generally handy to have two (or even three) of them, so buying a cheap multimeter first isn't a waste of money at all. (For cheap multimeters, I would go for the ones in the $10 range rather than the $5 range, myself, but even the $5 "Harbor Freight" style ones work about as well.)
floobydust wrote:
One of my old friends/colleagues was helping to setup a lab at UCF a couple years ago, he came across Digilent's Analogue Discovery. While I didn't get a chance to work with it directly (I was there consulting on a different project), he said it was pretty good. You might want to take a look at it. It offers a host of functions in a small package coupled to a Laptop or PC.
jfoucher wrote:
I'm going to take a contrarian view here and say that even the cheapest oscilloscope such as this one will be a help. It will be extremely limited as I'm sure we all realize, but I maintain it will be somewhat helpful even if annoying.
One issue with the cheaper 'scopes and computer-based systems is that they're slower and more of a pain to use, even if they do have the bandwidth you need. That slows down your learning, and (at least in my case) makes one more reluctant to drag the thing out and set it up.
It seems to be a rule of electronics that you can get by with cheaper and less capable test equipment once you understand well the circuits that you're debugging, but you need the more expensive test equipment to gain that knowledge. With just a logic probe I can do a lot more debugging of a microcomputer than I could a year or two ago, but I can do this becuase I've gone through such systems with a decent 'scope and now understand much better what the logic probe is (and isn't) showing me.
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