Electronic lab at home?
I'm a EE student, that said, this year in school we played a lot with analog trainers, oscilloscopes, and what not. This was only my first semester using that sort of equipment. My question is, is this equipment something that EE students use over and over again, or do experiments become nothing more than simulations(like on PSPICE) in higher courses?
If the equipment is something that we use a lot, would it be worth having a small lab at home? I did some research, and found that I can replicate my school's lab enviroment in my room for about $100 with second hand equipment(total price includes digital/analog trainer, oscilloscope, multimeter, function generator).
Some feedback from current or graduate EE students will be greatly appreciated.
I am an EE student as well, but it really depends on what areas you plan to focus on. I own a digital multimeter (which are great to have anyway) and digital scope and function generator. I have a power supply one which I made, one which I retrofitted, and I wish to buy one in the future. All of my equipment is functional but amateur by all standards and will only be suitable for low frequency applications. For building and testing of basic circuitry they work well enough for my needs.
If I could buy all of that for $100 I would, and I wish I knew where you shopped becuase I have never seen (with the exception of a multimeter) anything that cheap. I also have no idea what a D/A trainer or PSPICE are. I also own an ICD2 from microchip for my dsPIC and PIC programming, as well as a general programmer that I can write to EEPROM's and other microcontrollers with. I find that I can do most of my work at home unless I am dealing with high frequencies, RF utilities where i need the spectrum analyser, and anything optical.
I found it well worth the money I have spent on it especially now that I am working on grad projects where this basic set up in a nice autmosphere is very benifitial.
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