Outfitting a "Standard" Prototyping Lab

Maker, DIY
1

Greetings,

I am looking to outfit a component box of various commonly used and professional IC’s for rapid prototyping. I’d like some assistance with selecting and finding what IC’s are most helpful and suitable to a prototyping lab space. The items can double as educational material as well when applicable.

I’d essentially appreciate a starting point I can bounce off of and adjust the list of accordingly.

I am expecting items such as,
Resistors
Ceramic Caps
Polarized Caps
Op-Amps
Regulators
Comparators
Timers
Logic Gates
Voltage References
Relay’s
Registers
Counters
MUX/DEMUX
Latches
Microcontrollers (PIC/Arduino)
Battery Management
Displays
Sensors (IMU/Ultrasonic/ToF/Humid/Temp/Gas)

Open to any and all help getting a list together that everyone can benefit from.

2

Hello @thulson,

Welcome to the TechForum.

As a starting point, consider Horowitz and Hill’s Art of Electronics textbook and lab manual.

The content is slightly dated, and some components have been discontinued. However, the core concepts and devices will always be with us.

Note that shopping lists are included with both editions of the book. You can adjust the lists to best match you course objectives.

Happy breadboarding,

APDahlen

P.S. you may also be interested in my series of article concerning Jellybean semiconductors.

3

Thank you APDahlen, I’ll take a look at your suggestion.

4

Hi @thulson ,

I’d say the first thing you’ll need to decide is the generic type of the components that you’ll stock: SMD or thru-hole, or both. If you’re using breadboards, and the lab users are “beginners”, then probably the thru-hole type is preferred, but if you’ll use PCB router machine and/or custom PCBs, then SMDs may work better.

For passives, component kits may be the most convenient way to fill the shelves.

Cheers, heke

5

Good point @heke,

I had assumed conventional through-hole components.

Sincerely,

Aaron

6

I concur with @heke and through-hole is a good assumption. The facilities I have at the moment lack the infrastructure to support rapid SMD turn around. Having through hole components create a simple and easy to use method for quick turnaround boards for prototypes.

Appreciate the input!

7

The negatives to going only with through-hole include the following, at a minimum:

  • Many modern components only come in SMT packages, generally limiting the user to older generation parts
  • The circuit performance is generally inferior with through-hole parts, particularly on solderless bread boards, if doing precision, or high speed prototyping

For general conceptual prototyping, these may not be major concerns, but it will be somewhat limiting in what one can do.

For mitigating the issue of bread-boarding more modern components, we have these adapter boards to convert SMD to through-hole. This won’t help with the second point above, but gives you more options for bread-boarding.

8

We also carry a number of kits that may save you some time and effort that would be worth taking a look at.