Engineering

A holiday shopping guide for engineers: 2024 edition



As of this year, EDN has consecutively published (intentionally ahead of Black Friday, by the way, if you hadn’t already deduced that non-coincidence) my odes to holiday-excused consumerism for more than a half-decade straight, nearing ten editions in total. Here are the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 versions; I skipped a few years between 2014 and its successors. As in the past, I’ve included up-front links to the prior-year versions because I’ve done my best here to not reiterate any past category recommendations; the stuff I’ve previously suggested largely remains valid, after all. That said, it gets harder and harder each year not to repeat myself!

Without any further ado, and as usual ordered solely in the order in which they initially came out of my cranium…

A portable soldering iron

Being tethered in one place, or at best able to roam only a short distance from a power outlet, is a pet peeve of mine. It’s why, for example, I barely ever use a desktop computer anymore; not only are laptops and the like performance-adequate for most tasks nowadays, they also run for hours on batteries (no matter that mine’s still most times plugged into a wall outlet). It’s why I long ago replaced a legacy AC “weed whacker” with a battery-operated successor, accompanied by a suite of rechargeable lithium cells (and chargers) that also work with other portable tools.

Similarly, I’d sometimes prefer to take my soldering iron to where I need to use it versus always needing to drag whatever widget needs soldering down to my workbench and its AC outlet-fed traditional soldering iron set. That’s where the new FixHub |Power Series from my long-time buddies at iFixit comes in. The baseline is the $79.99 USB-C PD-based Smart Soldering Iron:

Up to 100 W of power (a 35-W minimum power source is necessary). Heats up in around 5 seconds. An illuminated ring for heat indication, along with safety features like auto standby and fall protection. Interchangeable soldering tips and a factory-preset default tip temperature of 350°C (660°F), subsequently user-adjustable between 100°C and 420°C. How, you might ask, since there’s no temperature dial shown in the picture? One setting-customization option is a Web Interface (currently not supporting Mozilla Firefox, alas, I’ve just learned), believe it or not.

The other option, which also neatly addresses the “what about that portability you were touting earlier” query some of you might be having right now, is a smartphone-sized 55 watt-hour portable battery-plus-control box, which iFixit optionally bundles with the soldering iron to come up with the $249.95 Portable Soldering Station. It delivers an estimated 8-hour runtime between charges and provides a second USB-C PD output for (among other things) devices such as what I’ll talk about next:

Inexpensive lab equipment

How’s that saying go: champagne taste on a beer budget? Or, if you prefer a visual definition:

That’s me, at least some of the time, and with some things (cameras aside, for example, although in self-defense here, pretty much everything photo-related I buy is already gently used). Which explains, in part, my burgeoning fascination with low-priced lab equipment. Another key motivation is to see, as time goes on and bill-of-materials cost reductions combine with customer demand increases, just how much (measured in both feature-set quantity and per-feature quality) I can get at a particular price point. Kinda like solar panel trends, I suppose…

Anyway, here are a few of my purchase examples for your consideration. First up is Jesverty’s WPS-3005 0-30 V and 0-5 A adjustable switching DC regulated bench power supply (other options with different output voltage and current ranges and case and display colors are also available), which I bought on sale at Amazon in October 2022 for $22.49:

Then there was the FNIRSI DSO-TC3, a 3-in-1 digital oscilloscope, electronic component tester, and function signal generator, the advanced (translation: more test probes included) version of which I snagged back in May of this year from Banggood for $39.99:

Serious testing equipment? Are you serious? But hey, the scope’s 10 MS/s sampling rate and 500-kHz bandwidth are nothing to sneeze at. It integrates a 2.4” color TFT display. Signal waveform generator options include sine, square, pulse stroke, triangle, ramp and DC. The DSO-TC3’s transistor and other component testing capabilities are notable, especially considering the price tag. A bunch of other available device functional modes are also listed on the product page, including temperature and humidity sensor measurement support. To my earlier point about roaming to where the (testing and measurement, in this case) “action” is versus forcing relocation to the gear-tethered workbench, it’s powered by an embedded lithium battery which, yes, can be recharged by (among other sources) the second USB-C PD port on the iFixit FixHub |Power box, as I foreshadowed earlier. And did I mention that it cost me less than $40?

Snazzy Raspberry Pi peripherals

Last year, I covered the recently introduced Raspberry Pi 5, which is now available in an entry-level $50 variant with 2 GBytes of RAM in addition to the originally introduced 4 GByte and 8 GByte flavors (two example of the latter which I own). This year, I’d like to focus on a few “RasPi” peripherals I’ve also recently acquired (and in another case, still have on my wish list). Focusing first on HAT+ add-in cards, the Raspberry Pi Foundation belatedly finally rolled out its own M.2 board, a while after third-party partners had done so. Unlike some of those others, however, it can be fitted to a Raspberry Pi 5 with the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler also in place…which is nice.

It also, unlike some third-party counterparts, and quoting from the product page, “is autodetected by the latest Raspberry Pi software/firmware.” This is the key reason why I always tend to go for “official” peripherals versus third-party alternatives, no matter how tempted I might be by those others’ specs. Do a bit of research, for example, into some third-party camera modules whose drivers don’t keep pace with base board firmware and O/S updates, inevitably ending up prematurely dropped from their suppliers’ support lists, and you’ll see what I mean.

Speaking of impressive specs, while the M.2 HAT+ board’s support for “fast (up to 500 MB/s) data transfer to and from NVMe drives” might sound impressive, realistically the Raspberry Pi 5’s microSD interface is plenty speedy enough for pretty much any current application; the biggest benefit to the M.2 alternative might be as a (cost-effective) high-capacity storage option. But note, too, the “and other PCIe accessories” qualifier in the originally published version of that earlier quote. What might those “other PCIe accessories” be, you ask? They include, for example, Hailo’s M.2 2242 module based on the Hailo-8L deep learning inference processor, which Raspberry PI bundles with the M.2 HAT+ as the $70 Raspberry Pi AI Kit:

Speaking of camera modules, what’s new in the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s stable? Well, there’s…

A power bank (or few)

I’ve conceptually discussed power banks before:

And even tore one down a few years back:

But unless I’m mistaken (always a possibility), I don’t think they’ve yet made one of my holiday gift lists. Let’s rectify that oversight, because they’re handy, powerful, totable and increasingly cost-effective devices. They sometimes integrate Qi wireless charging pads, as a supplement to their various wired power outputs, which some power banks further augment via MagSafe (Qi2, more broadly) support for convenient attachment to a drained-internal-battery phone:

And thanks to USB’s (specifically, USB-C’s) combo of increasing ubiquity and functional diversity, manufactures are even beginning to bundle lithium batteries with solid-state storage:

multi-port hub connectivity:

and in other multi-function single-device combinations, which admittedly is quite clever from a diversification-and-competitive isolation standpoint, when you think about it. Just remember, if you take one or multiple on an airplane, that as with external batteries for videography, each will need to be in your carry-on luggage, not checked, and smaller than 100 watt-hours in capacity.

Power stations

Beef up the internal battery capacity, along with the array of charging-input and power-output options, and you’ve got a portable power station on your hands, capable of fueling an appliance or few or even (if it’s big enough and your house is small enough) an entire room-to-residence for a notable amount of time in the absence of utility-sourced premises “juice”. Regular readers may recall that a few months ago, I covered the Phase2 Energy PowerSource 660Wh 1800-Watt Power Station I’d recently acquired:

“Portable” is admittedly arguable here, given its size and especially weight, due to its SLA (sealed lead acid) AGM (absorbed glass mat, although I haven’t yet definitively determined this latter variation) battery foundation. But it does the job and was relatively affordable. And thanks to the portable (an unarguable use of the term, this time) solar panel I also purchased for it:

I’m not even dependent on the presence of utility-sourced premises “juice” to recharge it.

That all said, as I also mentioned back in August, an increasing number and diversity of portable power stations are now appearing based on lighter weight and more compact, not to mention more powerful-per-pound and per-cubic-inch, lithium-variant battery technologies. As a sneak peek of more in-depth coverage to come, I’ll share that recently I’ve personally acquired two EcoFlow units. The smaller one, a RIVER 2:

is passable for overnight camping trips in the van, for example. Or a day’s worth of drone flying. Or for powering my CPAP machine and oxygen concentrator overnight. And I can use the aforementioned 100-W portable solar panel to also recharge it during the day (albeit not at the same time as the Phase2), in conjunction with an Anderson-to-XT60i connector adapter cable.

The other, beefier (but still portable) EcoFlow power station I recently bought is a DELTA 2:

which I’ve supplemented with two 220-W second-generation portable solar panels in conjunction with a parallel panel output-combiner cable:

That said, as I mentioned a few months ago, the number of credible (i.e., not no-name, fly-by-night) suppliers is steadily growing, at the moment also including companies such as (but not limited to) Anker, Bluetti, Jackery and, believe it or not, even DJI (to my earlier drone-flying comments). Whoever’s product(s) you end up buying, I encourage you to keep a key foundational differentiator in mind as you select among the options. LiFePO₄ (lithium iron phosphate), sometimes instead referred to by the LFP (lithium ferrophosphate) acronym, is one common lithium-based battery approach. Another popular battery technology, which in retrospect I realize I neglected to mention back in August, is NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt), which is also lithium-based although “lithium” is nowhere to be found in the name.

NMC batteries have a higher energy density, therefore delivering more power for a given cell volume, and operate more stably across temperature extremes. Conversely, LiFePO₄/LFP batteries are capable of significantly higher recharge cycle counts without degrading, are more cost-effective due to both rapidly growing manufacturing supply and booming customer demand and are more thermally stable. Which technology is inside a given power station can be hard to determine; the Energizer one I previously mentioned (and then briefly owned, which you’ll read more about later), for example, was only listed as using a “lithium-ion battery”, and only after doing a bunch of research did I learn that it was NMC. The effort’s worthwhile.

A portable SSD

The other day, in preparation for re-creation with higher capacity, I backed up a 20 GByte sparse bundle-based virtual disk to my 128 GByte Samsung S1 mini external storage device, based on a Spinpoint SPU 1.8” 3600 rpm HDD, over USB 2. It took about 30 minutes for the copy to complete. Then, acting out of curiosity, I also backed up that same 20 GByte file to my 1 TByte SK Hynix “Beetle” X31 portable SSD over USB-C-based USB 3.2 Gen2 (10 Gbps). This time, it took less than 30 seconds. And no, the difference wasn’t (just) due to the more modern interface. I think it’s time to retire the Samsung Si mini, with gratitude for its long, reliable service ;-).

If you want something with a USB “stick” or “thumb drive” reminiscent (albeit “thicker”) form factor instead, there’s always also the SK Hynix “Tube” T31, a 1 GByte variant of which I also own and which leverages USB-A-based USB 3.2 Gen2 (5 Gbps, this time):

The perhaps obvious key differentiation in these (and other: SK Hynix isn’t the sole supplier) cases, versus with a conventional USB flash “stick”, is the inclusion of a true NVMe SSD module inside, coupled to a fast interface to the outside world. And versus the conventional 2.5” external HDD-reminiscent form factors of the Samsung T5 and T7 portable SSDs I also own:

the SK Hynix T31 and X31 are more diminutive, albeit more peak capacity-limited.

Wireless…err…”research” assistance

This last one is at least mildly controversial, at least in Canada, where a ban was considered albeit ultimately paused, and Brazil, where imports were seized. It’s the $169 Flipper Zero:

described on the manufacturer’s website as (among other things) a “Multi-tool Device for Geeks” and, more extensively:

A versatile tool for hardware exploration, firmware flashing, debugging, and fuzzing [editor note: testing various protocols and signals]. It can be connected to any piece of hardware using GPIO to control it with buttons, run your own code and print debug messages to the LCD. It can also be used as a regular USB adapter for UART, SPI, I2C, etc.

Flipper Zero supports a diversity of wireless RF schemes—125 kHz RFID, NFC, Bluetooth Low Energy, etc.—along with infrared, and integrated microSD support further expands its data and application storage (and execution, in the latter case) capabilities. So, what’s the controversy? Simply stated, hardware “exploration” can in at least some cases transform into “exploitation”. Canadian officials have controversially claimed, for example, that Flipper Zero devices can be used to steal vehicles by cloning the signals used for remote keyless entry. So, assuming you take my bait and buy one, the Christmas-themed question then is “will you be naughty or nice”?

Even more for beyond 2024

I’ve got plenty of additional presents-to-others-and/or-self ideas, but the point isn’t to write a book, so I’ll close here, having just passed through 2,500 words. Upside: I’ve already got topics for next year’s edition! Until then, sound off in the comments, and happy holidays!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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