Adafruit Industries has a nice toolkit for those venturing into electronics. The “carefully selected hand tools” in their kit, shown above, include a 30W adjustable temperature soldering iron complete with indicator LED, a soldering stand with sponge and iron holder, a solder sucker, a 1/4 pound spool of 60/40 solder, a 5′ spool of solder wick, a PanaVise Jr. PCB holder and general-purpose 360° mini-vise, a basic digital multimeter, wire strippers, diagonal cutters, needle-nose pliers, three 25′ spools of solid-core wire in black, red, and yellow, and a half-size solderless breadboard. As a bonus, you also get the parts needed to build a 5-volt power supply. All this for $100.
I did not try to add up the best online prices for all the individual parts (a couple of links to parts available on Amazon are listed below), but others on the web have done so, and the range for buying all the parts piecemeal is ~ $90—$110. So, given the time for ordering individual items and the separate postage involved, this toolkit seems like a good value.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
