At-Home Testing

Lately I've had a renewed motivation to finish up an old project from a while back, as well as prepare for an exciting new one! Over the past week, I've been rushing to add the leftover components for a DIY oscilloscope kit that i meant to have finished up months ago. I figured the little project would help keep my soldering skills strong for work while also adding a new tool for my own at-home electronics workbench.

Overview of Equipment

 In this photo you can see my soldering station with flux, solder, and tip tin on the top right. Followed by my solder sucker, helping hands, and leftover components on the top left. The bottom two items are the oscilloscope board (in red) with the schematic diagram.

 Oscilloscope Board (In Progress)

A close up of the board, I forgot to give it a scale in the photo, but most of those components are barely even bigger than a grain of rice. They're extremely easy to lose, and unfortunately I only really have backup resistors (those little striped blue pills) in stock at home. Fortunately, the kit came with the Surface Mount components (tiny black rectangles with shiny metal ends) already on, I probably would've never finished if I lost one of those considering they're even SMALLER than most of the components on there.

Schematic of Oscilloscope Board

I'm constantly double checking the schematic to make sure the right component is in the right slots. Unsurprisingly, the diagram is not an exact mapping of the actual board layout. Every single symbol corresponds to a different type of component, luckily I haven't forgotten which ones they belong to!

Finished Build

This is what the build should look like when completed. It will allow me to look at the electrical signal flowing through different parts in a circuit.

This is just a bit of a glimpse into what I sometimes do at work, this is probably more complex than what I do there, to be honest. My biggest fear is that it won't start after soldering all the components  in, luckily there's some testing points on the schematic that I can check for proper voltages. If I'm following the schematic as closely as I think I am though, I should be perfectly okay. Hopefully a couple posts from now I'll have it done, as well as have my next project ready to showcase (it's a bar-top arcade cabinet for my dad shhh don't tell him).