What Next? 231Customizing Your Work AreaLabeling
No matter which way you choose to store your parts, labeling them is essential.
Any ink-jet printer will produce neat-looking labels, and if you use peelable
(nonpermanent) labels, you’ll be able to reorganize your parts in the future, as
always seems to become necessary. I use color-coded labels for my collection
of resistors, so that I can compare the stripes on a resistor with the code on the
label, and see immediately if the resistor has been put in the wrong place. See
Figure 5-6.
Even more important: you need to place a second (non-adhesive) label inside
each compartment with the components. This label tells you the manufac-
turer’s part number and the source, so that reordering is easy. I buy a lot of
items from Mouser, and whenever I open their little plastic bags of parts, I snip
out the section of the bag that has the identifying label on it, and slide it into
the compartment of my parts box before I put the parts on top of it. This saves
frustration later.
If I were really well organized, I would also keep a database on my computer
listing everything that I buy, including the date, the source, the type of com-
ponent, and the quantity. But I’m not that well organized.
On the Bench
Some items are so essential that they should sit on the bench or desktop on
a permanent basis. These include your soldering iron(s), helping hands with
magnifier, desk lamp, breadboard, power strip, and power supply. For a desk
lamp, I prefer the type that has a daylight-spectrum fluorescent bulb, because
it spreads a uniform light and helps me to distinguish colors of adjacent stripes
on resistors.
The power supply is a matter of personal preference. If you’re serious about
electronics, you can buy a unit that delivers properly smoothed current at a
variety of properly regulated and calibrated voltages. Your little wall-plug unit
from RadioShack cannot do any of these things, and its output may vary de-
pending on how heavily you load it. Still, as you’ve seen, it is sufficient for basic
experiments, and when you’re working with logic chips, you need to mount a
5-volt regulator on your breadboard anyway. Overall, I consider a good power
supply optional.
Another optional item is an oscilloscope. This will show you, graphically, the
electrical fluctuations inside your wires and components, and by applying
probes at different points, you can track down errors in your circuit. It’s a neat
gadget to own, but it will cost a few hundred dollars, and for our tasks so far, it
has not been necessary. If you plan to get seriously into audio circuits, an oscil-
loscope becomes far more important, because you’ll want to see the shapes of
the waveforms that you generate.
You can try to economize on an oscilloscope by buying a unit that plugs into
the USB port of your computer and uses your computer monitor to display the
signal. I have tried one of these, and was not entirely happy with the results. It
worked, but did not seem accurate or reliable for low-frequency signals. May-
be I was unlucky; I decided not to try any other brands.
Figure 5-6. To check that resistors are not
placed in the wrong compartments, print
the color code on each label.