Setting up an electronics lab requires only a few standard pieces of equipment and tools. While specialty pieces of equipment may be essential for your application, the common tools are the same for almost any electronics lab.

The multimeter’s flexibility combined with its precision and accuracy make multimeters a useful tool in any electronics lab. Multimeters measure both AC and DC voltage and current, as well as resistance. Multimeters are often used in troubleshooting designs and testing prototype circuits. Multimeter accessories include transistor test modules, temperature sensor probes, high-voltage probes, and probe kits. Multimeters can be purchased for as little as $10 and can cost several thousand for a high-precision, high-accuracy benchtop unit.

As versatile as multimeters are, they cannot measure capacitance or inductance. That’s where inductance, capacitance, and resistance meters come in. LCR meters come in two flavors: a less expensive version that measures the total impedance of a component, and a more expensive type that measures all of the components: component impedance, equivalent series resistance, and component quality factor. The accuracy of inexpensive LCR meters is often quite poor, with tolerances as high as 20 percent. Since many capacitors themselves have a tolerance of 20 percent, combining the meter and component tolerances creates additional challenges when designing and troubleshooting electronics.

Electronics is all about signals, and the oscilloscope is the primary measuring instrument for observing the shape of signals. Oscilloscopes, often called o-scopes or simply scopes, display signals in a graphical format on a pair of axes, generally with Y as the voltage and X as the time. This format provides a very powerful method for understanding the shape of a signal, determining what is happening in an electronic circuit, and monitoring its performance or troubleshooting problems. Oscilloscopes are available in digital and analog varieties, starting at a few hundred dollars and going into the tens of thousands for high-end models. Digital scopes have a variety of measurement and trigger options built into the system, making measurements of peak-to-peak voltage, frequency, pulse width, rise time, signal comparisons, and waveform capture simple tasks.