Stuff in my Workshop

My workshop... Or my lab... Or, in other words, my room. I wish I did have a separate, dedicated, workshop! Or even a garage would do as a makeshift nerd cave (since I don't have a car to keep in there). In addition to doing electronic stuff, for which I have a bunch of test equipment, I also occasionally need to modify, frobnicate or create some mechanical doohickey, be it an odd sized bolt, an odd shaped nut, a clamp, holder or adapter, or a launch lug for an amateur rocket. On occasion I also need to make (or modify) circuit boards for various electronic things. So I have filled my room with a variety of stuff.

	My DIY Electronics Workbench This dominates my workshop. The desk is an age-old office desk, bought used, which has been with me over 20 years. It's from the time when even office desks were sturdy! I added shelves to it to house all my test equipment. The shelves are just that—wooden shelves, and they are supported by threaded rods sticking up from the back of the desk. Nuts and washers go on either side of the shelves, and offer easy adjustment of their height. Way up at the top there's a big LED lighting fixture, and on the desktop there's an ESD mat. There's a "side desk" sticking out of it. That houses my main desktop PC, i.e. the keyboard and mouse sit on it, and I've fitted it with a custom holder for my 27-inch monitor and Genelec speakers. On the opposite side of that, I've constructed a custom desk that fills up that entire end of my room. So I sit surrounded by desk space on three sides, and on the fourth side is my bookcase.
	MBS-9 (МБС-9) Stereo Microscope (Made in good old Soviet Union, way before Mr. P's regime) Manufactured by LZOS (ЛЗОС)—not by LOMO (ЛОМО), which is a common misconception Very similar to the (slightly newer?) MBS-10 (МБС-10). Actually, I don't know if there's any physical difference. 4.8×, 8×, 16×, 32× and 56× magnifications with the standard 8× eyepieces Modifications done: Homebrew LED illumination with a 3 W LED, antistatic mat over the microscope's base Weller WD-1000T Digital Soldering Station WD-1 power unit WSP-81 (a.k.a. WP80) 80 W soldering pencil WDH 10T "Stop&Go" safety stand An assortment of LT tips This replaced my old Xytronic 369 which also was excellent With these I have even soldered the occasional 0402 SMD component (inside my UV-3R radio). Though for convenience, I prefer to design my own circuits with 1206 (or at least 0805) or through-hole components. I have also considered making a reflow oven, but haven't got one yet. Really I don't have room for one either. With a wider tip, the 80 Watt soldering station is powerful enough to solder wires onto NiMH cells pretty much instantly, without overheating the cells.
	Proxxon Mini Drill and Stuff This mini drill setup was the reason I finally built another desk, to custom dimensions, to fit opposite the "side desk" that my primary PC dominates. The electronics workbench was just too crowded for a drill/mill. It alone does not dominate that desk; there's plenty of other stuff taking root there as well. In fact, why is it that when desk space doubles, the amount of stuff on them triples??? Anyway, when I sit in my "nerd cave", I'm surrounded on three sides by desk space, with almost everything within arm's reach. Is that not perfect?  :) The Proxxon mini drill setup is fitted with a custom modified drill stand, a compound table, an eccentric clamp, machine vise, dividing head, custom foot switch, an adapted USB microscope and a DIY dust collection system. I use them for machining the occasional small part, customizing the odd bolt of screw, drilling home-made PCBs, etc... Pretty much any mechanical work too sophisticated for a pair of pliers. (Yes, it's still a toy, but I can't fit a real milling machine in my room.)
	Handicraft nuts—A better "helping hand" This is an idea I once picked up in the Finnish Radioamatööri magazine—unfortunately I don't remember the author Ordinary hex nuts—large ones—are much better than the ubiquitous "helping hand" And cheaper!
	My DIY UV Exposure Box On the rare occasion I actually design a custom PCB, I've rarely had it made professionally. For a one-off design, it's so much faster just to print it out on overhead transparency, and expose, develop and etch it to a photosensitive PCB. I used to do the exposure with a fluorescent tube desk lamp, but when I realized those won't be around much longer, I panicked and started looking for another solution. It seems that, although fluorescent tubes have been all but outlawed because they contain awful poisonous mercury, there were still a few home-discotheque UV bulbs available at a nearby store, in the briefly common "compact fluorescent lamp" format. I bought a couple of those, and made a proper, dedicated, UV exposure box. Complete with a parabolic reflector made of aluminum sheet metal, it provides very uniform illumination over the entire surface of a 160×100 mm PCB.
	Scales: Necessary for precisely mixing epoxy glue, weighing model rocket parts, measuring lethally hot chili pepper, etc. Mettler Toledo PM100 (110 g / 1 mg), part of a Mettler Toledo LP16 infrared dryer / moisture analysis system. Both the scale and the dryer seem to have serial data interfaces, which I have not tested. In fact, I haven't even tested the whole dryer thing yet—I bought this thing at an online auction just for the scale, which is true lab grade and worth way more than I paid for the whole. Tomopol P800 (800/0.1 g), P600 (600/0.1 g) and P60 (60/0.01 g): Very cheap eBay scales, and quite good for their price, as long as their batteries are relatively fresh. If the scale's reading keeps drifting as you watch, it's the batteries running down. OBH Nordica 9860 kitchen scale (5 kg / 1 g) for heavier stuff
	Awful smelly chemicals Doing electronics, mechanical stuff, repairs or modifications does often require some general purpose service chemicals such as lubricants, glues and solvents. But, being a chemist, I may have gone slightly overboard with them... Big deal, they all have their uses, and will last pretty much forever. And just like having the right tool for the job makes life a lot easier, so does having the right chemical for the job. These live in the same bookcase which occupies the fourth compass point from my chair, the other three being desk space.
	My bookcase Surrounded on three sides by desk space, the fourth side is my bookcase. Much of it is filled with SciFi I like, all the mandatory ARRL publications (e.g. the ARRL Handbook, the ARRL Antenna Book, the Antenna Compendium, Experimental Methods in RF Design, and Amateur Radio Astronomy), the ubiquitous Art of Electonics (2nd ed.) by Horowitz & Hill, a lot of other nerdy publications for reference and ideas, various star maps and deep sky directories, and some remnants of my previous life as a chemist. Plus too many miscellaneous nerd books to catalog in the limited space that is the Internet. No, don't try to sell me any eBook or iBook readers. Being the dinosaur that I am, I prefer paper books. Besides, paper stores carbon, which would otherwise be in our atmosphere. (No, the tree that it was made from would not have stored it forever—it would eventually die, fall, rot, and re-realease all the CO2 it had ever absorbed. Libraries, and infinite paper-based bureaucracies, are the key to solving the CO2 problem that causes global warming. Paperless offices do not help.) The same bookcase also houses numerous boxes of electronic parts, proto boards, mechanical bits and pieces, tools, awful smelly chemicals, and even a few memorabilia.
	The computers My primary PC, named Juusto5, lives on the "side desk". It is an Intel NUC mini-desktop with a 27-inch monitor, a Behringer UMC404HD audio interface, and a custom modified Behringer Eurorack MX802A mixer connecting it (and various other sound sources) to a pair of Genelec 1029A speakers and MB Quart QP200 headphones. The PC runs Debian Linux. For controlling my various lab equipment, I have a headless Raspberry Pi (actually one of many) named Naprika (that's a meta-vegetable which is almost but not entirely dissimilar to paprika). It serves a couple of web front-ends to my GPIB-connected test equipment. My newest Raspberry Pi, named Quux, is primarily intended for SDR use, but it also serves the USB microscope on my mini drill setup for accurately drilling PCBs. It is my only Raspberry Pi with a dedicated monitor, keyboard and mouse. It lives on the desk opposite the "side desk".

What's still missing? I wish I had room for a lathe, and a bigger drill press that could take bits up to 10 mm or so. If some day I finally apply for and receive a permit to put antennas on the roof of our building, I'll have to squeeze in my amateur radio station as well.