The Bench

The gear behind the work

Good board work needs the right tools — you can’t reflow a BGA or chase a short with a soldering iron and hope. Here’s what’s actually on the bench, by job. Most of it is the cheap-but-right tier rather than the name-brand tier, on purpose: this is a bench that has to earn its upgrades.

Some of the links below are affiliate links. They cost you nothing extra, and a little comes back to the bench if you buy through them. Nothing here is listed because of the link — it’s listed because it’s on the bench.

Optics

  • Trinocular stereo zoom microscope — 3.5×–90×, double-arm boom, 56-LED ring light. The real microsoldering rig: stereo depth for hand work, and a third port for the camera.
  • BTER 4K trinocular camera — plain UVC over USB-C, straight into OBS with no vendor software in the chain. The scope feed on stream is this.
  • Sipeed T256s thermal camera — 256×192 LWIR with a 5 cm macro focus, raw Y16 over USB. Registered onto the scope image by benchhud, so the part that’s cooking lights up on the board. Held by a printed clamp on the ring light.
  • Andonstar AD210 — standalone 10" LCD microscope. Inspection only, no video out.

Heat

  • YIHUA 948-II — 4-in-1 rework station: hot air, iron, desolder gun, vacuum pickup. The desolder gun is the part that gets used more than you’d expect.
  • A full soldering station alongside it, plus ceramic tweezers for hot-air work (non-conductive, heat-safe) and a beater pair of ESD tweezers for everything rough.
  • Foil tape and kapton for shielding neighbours during rework — aluminium shields, copper sinks, and the adhesive is the real temperature limit.

Measurement and short-hunting

  • OWON SPM8104 — bench PSU and DMM in one box, 0–80 V / 10 A, with SCPI over USB. This is what feeds a laptop 19 V with a current limit and what benchhud reads for the on-screen meter.
  • HR1520 injection box — the short-killer. Inject current into a dead rail, watch the thermal camera find the part that’s eating it.
  • YEAPOOK ADS1014D — 100 MHz two-channel scope with a DDS signal generator built in.
  • DSLogic Plus — 16-channel logic analyzer, native on Linux and macOS via DSView.
  • FNIRSI LCR-P1 — component tester for the “what is this and is it dead” question.
  • Two AstroAI true-RMS multimeters, and a test-lead kit with hooks, tweezers, and needle probes.

Programming and retro

  • XGecu T48 with the adapter bundle — EEPROM and ROM programmer, driven by minipro from the command line. No Windows required.
  • Jonard IC extractors for DIPs, and a Gamebit driver for NES, SNES, N64, and Sega carts.

Power

  • Mean Well LRS-350-12 — 12 V / 29 A, the primary bench supply, in its own printed pod.
  • ENGINDOT 30 V / 5 A — the secondary adjustable supply, wearing the Shortkiller topper.
  • A 41-tip DC barrel adapter kit for feeding laptops from the bench supply, and a home-made banana-to-barrel master cord because the kit ships with no male barrel.

BGA and pad repair

  • Magnetic reballing station with a stencil library, Sn63/Pb37 paste as the default and Sn42/Bi58 low-temp for heat-sensitive boards.
  • Copper pad and trace repair kit, UV-curable green solder mask, and a 365 nm lamp to cure it. The mask lives in a printed opaque rack because ambient light skins it.

Hand tools and the rest

  • A 142-piece precision driver set, a self-adjusting Klein stripper, a HARDELL rotary tool with its own printed station, ferrule and Dupont crimpers, calipers, an ESD mat and strap, and a heat-resistant silicone work mat.
  • GMKtec G11 mini PC — the Linux bench host that runs benchhud, behind a self-powered 10 Gbps USB hub so the scope camera, thermal camera, and capture box don’t fight over bus power.
  • Snapmaker U1 — the printer that made the fixtures holding all of the above. See 3D Printer Models and Snapmaker U1 tooling.

Custom tooling

The bench also runs software I’m building for it. benchhud pulls the microscope feed, the thermal camera, and live instrument readings into one heads-up display — so a component’s heat bloom labels the component, and the meter reading sits right next to the work instead of across the desk. bench-parts is the inventory behind it, and benchhud-intake is the front door.