Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”
There are quite a few but none are super active.
I’m really happy I don’t have enough space for that stuff. Otherwise I would be poor. It’s hard enough to keep myself from buying another old computer.
I would love to read about this $20 weather station! Do you maybe have a link?
Mine is pretty basic but is built on the shoulders of giants. Also that $20 was from pre-pandemic / pre-chip shortage prices. I’m guessing it’s more like $35 now, or maybe high $20s from ali express.
I use Home Assistant for home automation. It has a now official addon called ESPHome for easily configuring esp devices and adding them to Home Assistant.
I bought some cheap dev boards off amazon and thankfully they worked
an esp8266 microcontroller with IC2 headers and a microusb port already onboard
a bmp280 that measures temp, humidity, and barometric pressure
a lux sensor with a plastic dome over the top
I soldered them together on a prototyping board
All the components were supported by esphome, so I just needed to write the device config and then flash the devboard via esphome (in a web browser) over the built in usb.
I 3d printed a housing for it, but you can also buy boxes. It needs airflow but also needs to stay dry. You can use a spray sealant to help avoid corrosion from ambient humidity. I skipped that step because I want to see how quickly it becomes problematic… and I should probably check on that.
You can get a cheap oscilloscope that uses USB and your computer. https://www.sainsmart.com/products/sainsmart-dds-140-40m-200m-s-virtual-oscilloscope-logic-analyzer
Not that I have an electronics problem
yeah I got a fancy lab power supply but stopped at oscilloscopes, those things are expensive.
it’s still cheap and fun to do a lot of stuff, but now I wanna build a sound-card based oscilloscope.
Good soldering gear already makes me wince. I couldn’t imagine paying $500+ for an oscilloscope.
Fortunately I’m more interested in the software side of things… thank God nobody charges for programming toolchains anymore.
Same. I’m lucky for software to be my hobby/career. It’s practically free. Contrary to popular misconception, it doesn’t require any kind of special or more powerful hardware (for most dev, at least). Maybe $150 for a second monitor, for sanity, but that’s not actually necessary.
…I mean, I do have good hardware too, but that’s for my gaming hobby, not my software hobby.
To be fair, if C++ or Rust is your thing… let’s just say I’d have a Threadripper if they weren’t five grand.
I once had to (repeatedly) compile a C++ codebase on some Lenovo shitbook. It ended up being so infuriating (thirty seconds, minimum) that I wrote a few load-bearing shell scripts to rsync everything to my desktop, build it, and copy the binary back… which was ultimately about five times faster.
Man, I wish I could have just used MicroPython for that project.
Can you recommend any good soldering gear for an intermediate level? I’ve done plenty of soldering over the years but have always used crappy low end products. It’s always been a struggle to properly do a clean-true solder (not just heating the solder like I see everywhere) even though I try to meticulously maintain my equipment. I’m hoping that it’s just the equipment I use and a higher end one will make things a breeze like I see the professional’s use.
It’s really a pain in my ass. On top of maintaining the equipment I have whole setups I’ve constructed to hold wires and equipment snugly so I can properly apply heat. I purchased a high temp kit but it’s cheap as well and still sometimes run into the same problem, with the smaller components and projects though I’m afraid to use it and overheat something that can’t handle it.
My tips for solder gear are
- get temp control
- get one with easily swapped tips… Of an industry standard size. It’s super helpful to have multiple tip sizes
- clean your tip with brass sponge!!!^1
- cheat mode: use liquid solder flux, Kester 2331 ZX
- follow Sparkfun’s soldering tutorial.
1 I taught a bunch of elementary kids how to solder. We only had water sponges and within minutes nobody could solder right. I had one brass sponge and it made instant difference. Now the tip could actually conduct heat properly. It is seriously an unexpected total game changer.
As for the brand… Whatever Sparkfun or Adafruit is selling is legit but more budget friendly. I took a look and Sparkfun has some good options from Weller.
I got a Weller WS81. It’s been good except the first wand didn’t like too much side pressure (user error really). Otherwise it’s been totally solid for years. They cost a lot less when I got it. Yikes. Get the cheaper WE1010 or the other red one.
An Aoyue might be ok. My Aoyue hot air rework station has been solid for the past several years assembling several hundred boards.
Hope this helps
I’m not really the right guy to ask - I don’t have that much soldering experience, and I’m a broke college student - but I’ve found the Pinecil to be Pretty Good™ for my use case of “occasionally soldering things to microcontrollers.”
It accepts power over USB-C, so no need for a bulky (and expensive) base station like a Hakko or Weller. (You do need an AC adapter capable of pushing 65W PD, but if you’re into electronics you probably already have something like that just lying around.) Proper temperature control is also nice compared to the cheap “plug and go” irons.
YMMV, I upgraded to it from a Home Depot butane iron (yes it was as bad as it sounds) so…
I would totally recommend a good precision pencil-style iron. They are somewhat expensive (400$ to 600$), but super nice and easy to use. All the power supply and control electronics is in the base, making the actual iron super light and easy to use, furthermore the hot part is tiny, so it’s much easier to avoid touching it when doing fine work. Despite the small size of the hot end, they do very well on large parts, and are able to heat up instantly.
Lol I feel ya. I ended up making and selling electronics kits to fund the hobby somewhat.
I have been using cheap vintage oscilloscopes the whole time.
Not sure what they go for now but $100 for a 20MHz scope and $200 for a 100MHz was what it was several years ago. Cheapest I got off a buddy for $40. I am still using that one.
Sometimes I fix broken ones and sell them. One time I got one that they thought was broken but turned out it was just the basic settings. I like trying different ones so I have gone through a dozen or so by now.
Now* that I think about it, o-scopes are a whole other hobby lol.
Anyway. Yeah by the time you get the test gear and enough sensors and microcontrollers and whatever it adds up.
Right now I’m working on a power supply design for a 50W class D stereo. Found out big toroidal transformers are not cheap. Oof. And enclosures big enough (especially if labeled “amplifier” or “stereo”) are ridiculously spendy.
This sounds like the point where you dive into the next rabbit hole of making enclures. At least I could see that happening.
I’m looking to make some wooden enclosures for some things myself.
Erk. I got into this. What’s the tipping point that gets you eyeing oscilloscopes? I’m at the fiddly smd stage.
My next step is custom boards and smds, and an oscilloscope seems like a good way to diagnose when reflow goes wrong. I already have had some fights with I2C using dev boards. But really I’m eyeing one because I have allusions about doing fine calibration on analog sensors.
I should add that I’ve been talking myself out of an oscilloscope for 2+ years now. I don’t REALLY need one.
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
I currently bought an old desktop from a friend that I use as my Homeserver.
- I bought 3 HDDs for storage
- I rent a VPS
- I rented Proton to host mail for my domain, but switched to netcup groupware because that sucked.
- Some domains
- Electricity
Wow I thought it was way more.
One time costs: ~500€ Monthly costs: ~15€ Plus electricity, but I have solar. I assume it’s about 150€/year
But I’m a cheap selfhosted, but eventually, I will have a huge ass Enterprise Level Rack in my basement.
Pretty sure I’ve seen a few home lab communities already, one on lemmy.world even
I ran a “midrange” Sun at home for about ten years. The electric bill was painful, but I never had to turn on the heat in the winter.
Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
Knitting is expensive for me because I love to start projects but I’m not great at finishing them. Good quality yarn really isn’t cheap.
I really, really love knitting. I’m not good, and I have a hard time finishing projects (tragic case of batterscain. I jump from thing to thing.), but the actual knitting itself? OMG, I love having something to do with my hands, and that something actual makes a real, tangible thing? Somehow magically out of a ball of string? What‽ It’s lovely.
It’s insane, though, how people who don’t knit/crochet will just treat a knitted or crocheted item like it’s a cheap Walmart graphic tee. They do not respect the work put into it.
Yeah. I knitted gorgeous socks and scarves in hand-dyed merino for some good friends. Come Christmas they obviously thought, oh MrsDoyle likes knitting, let’s get her something knitting related! A selection of the cheapest, nastiest acrylic in hideous colours and some needles. Oooooh. Thank you so much.
Yeah protip never buy a hobbyist anything unless they tip you what they want.
Ouch… Yeah. As a general rule of thumb, if I’m buying someone something craft related it’s either because I know enough about the craft to get them something truly nice, or I get them a gift card to their favorite craft related place. Outside of that, I’ll just ask them what they want. Lol. I enjoy a bunch of different crafts, including wood working. A friend once got me a set of chisels when they found out I liked wood working. … They were plastic with just the very ends being metal, and would break if you looked at the harshly. Lol. The thought behind it was sweet, but they had no idea what they were doing. Lol.
Just started crocheting, and I’m just holding myself back from buying all the yarn, it’s gonna get bad
Whatever you do, don’t go looking for yarn on Etsy. Fuck, I’ve said too much.
Oh yes. Yes. I went to the Edinburgh Yarn Festival a few years back. I live nearby, but met people there who’d come from all over - Europe, Japan, the US. All three days sold out. The yarns were so beautiful! And oh so expensive. But you were there in person, fan-girling with you favourite dyers and pattern designers! Spend spend spend. The nearest cash machine ran dry. Such an expensive hobby. But I can’t stop.
I’ve found my people… as I cry into this shawl project on my lap, of merino fingering yarn I paid to have imported because “you want to support small yarn producers” telling myself, “it’s not soft enough. Just throw it away and buy that cashmere/silk blend that you know feels like butter.” 🫠
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying “proper coffee”
To
Buying a cafetiere (~£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~£170)
To
Buying an entry Level “proper” espresso machine (~£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I’d actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I’m a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.
That’ll only happen if you build your own boards and stuff. Not like me! I just got a simple Moonlander with some custom keycaps, dampeners, and red switches rather than my initial brown. After that, I realised that the Kinesis Advantage 360 is the way to go, so I’m fully settled now, not like everyone else … right?
My first “good” keyboard is my current one, which is a Ducky One 2 Mini with MX Cherry Browns I bought really cheap 2nd hand. It has been almost 2 years I’ve been using it and I recently got a coiled cable for it. I was cleaning it the last time and I started to wonder how hard it would be if I wanted to change my switches and fell into a hole where now I want to desolder everything and install sockets. My spouse got lubs for his stabilizers (he has a Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja with MX Cherry Blues) after watching a few videos… We just started diving into this deeper and deeper after using keyboards from the time cherry still had the patent up for so long. Yeah, we are screwed.
thats what I thought when I built my quefrency, then rev 5 came out, then now rev 6 is coming out, now I have my first proto* one I built lying around, and I have a rev 4 at home and a rev 5 at the office for work, need to figure out how Im going to get that rev 6, each one I build better than the last even though I thought my second one was going to be my end game haha
Ditto on that. Thought I was content with my first ergo but one thing after another led to an artisan keyboard with CNC backplates and plates, 2 year long group buys, and artisans to match the whole theme that costs the same as the keyboard. At this point I’m so far in the hole that my artisan keycap collection cost more than my keyboard collection.
It’s just another one of those hobbies that has many moving parts so you can optimize and personalize each part.
I never got the appeal of mechanical keyboards. If you actually have to type all day, a proper flat keyboard like in the old MacBooks ('09-ish) is way nicer and costs much less.
I have a laptop (HP Elitebook G6) as a workstation at work which I use to type reports on site and a varmilo with linear switches in the office.
At home I have a GMMK Pro with Kailh Box white switches.
I can type on my laptop but I still prefer my GMMK pro over it thrice and I enjoy my varmilo in the office because of the numpad. Else I’d bring my GMMK pro there (with quieter switches).
In the end: This hobby is very personal and one may like linear while another likes clicky and in the end both spend 500€ on hardware but all do one thing: They enjoy what they type on :)
