Bobby Newmark · 2023-09-05 10:53
Hey lain. I am starting to do more personal electronics projects. I dont have access to things like an oscilloscope or voltage source, and it makes it very difficult to test and debug things with just a multimeter.
How did you obtain your equipment for cheap? Any tips on online auctions, where to dumpser dive, etc? Any success/failiure stories?
Zero Cool · 2024-03-12 10:08
>>10825
Garage Sales are the bomb.
Ivan Petrov · 2024-03-12 21:46
Expensive private tech universities tend to make decent dumpster diving.
These days I go and spend money on some cheap thing online though. It's usually not worth the effort in my mind to fix up and research some obsolete piece of equipment when I can just get something in good working order - perhaps that's not very lain of me but it is the case.
There may be exceptions here. I know that in chemical work, some fairly basic components are so obscenely expensive that it is totally worth it to scavenge.
Koos van der Merwe · 2024-03-13 19:34
>>10825
Military surplus auctions in the USA. You can find some neat things. Some things are illegal to export, and sometimes you are required to buy the whole bulk lot of microscopes or whatever. At one point you could buy NASA rocket and dual purpose hardware components, but apparently they stopped that after some pictures showed up in foreign press releases where you could still see the US tags in the background of the equipment being used.
You can find everything from electronics to biological sample handling equipment for dirt cheap. $5000 of Equipment for $150 kind of cheap.