First I have to warn you: I can’t really give you advice if this oscilloscope is any good. But I can tell you about my experience of putting it together! And I can already tell that I had a lot of fun. It has been a while since I have put together a electronics kit for soldering which was not one of my own products. And I was also curious how other producers of kits document the steps.

The Parts

As you can tell form the photo above the kit comes with about 20-30 parts which you have to put together. All SMD components have already been soldered on the two PCBs which leaves only through-hole components for you to put in place. Here are the tools I needed which were not in the kit:

• Regular soldering iron (20 Watt)
• Solder
• Something to cut the excess wires
• 9 Volt power supply with barrel jack (+ on the inside)
• Phillips screw driver

The Instructions

The instructions come with two 2-sided sheets of paper with color printed photos and tell you everything you need to know. I’m a regular composer/ puzzler of IKEA furniture and the oscilloscope instructions required far less guess work than the average IKEA manual. Just follow them step by step, since they make sure that you solder bigger components in the end which makes it a lot easier to place the smaller ones. They even have a nice little test in the beginning where they ask you to power up the bare board to see if the screen comes up as expected. Later you have to remove a SMD resistor which is only there to allow this test to work since you will solder the power switch only later down the road.

Summary

The instructions were really thorough and it took me about 90 minutes to put the components together. It was a good experience since I could train my soldering, have a glimpse how other people write electronic kit instructions and also how components on multiple PCBs can be put together in a tiny case.

Where to buy

I got this kit from Banggood. If you want to support his blog please use this link and I will get a small kickback for your purchase:
Original JYE Tech DSO-SHELL DSO150 15001K DIY Digital Oscilloscope Kit With Housing

The Lego House

Thomas Arlitt from Germany built his Weather Station based on a 2.6″ display from Drigole. His daughter said that it needs a house so they made one out of Lego. Thanks a lot for sharing and sorry that it took so long to publish it. If you are interested in his code please leave a comment on this page.

3D printed Case

My good colleague Peter Kohler (@hb9tvk) gave me the first introduction on how to use a 3D printer. He has done some cool projects like a morse code trainer for another colleague or a digitizing his analog water meter with a 3d printed sensor lid. And he also recently designed a wonderful case for the WeatherStation color. If I remember correctly he designed it with a latch so there is no need for screws on the enclosure. Thank you a lot for sharing Peter and for your constructive feedback about the code!

WeatherStation with Traffic Info

Olly Klassen (@NemosNautilus, http://olly.ch/) is living also in Switzerland and he is famous for his home theater  which is a detailed steampunk reconstruction of the interior of the Nautilus, you know, the famous submarine of captain Nemo from 20.000 Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne. But Olly is not only good with mechanical tools, he can also program. He added another frame to the OLED WeatherStation and is displaying the current time it would take for him to drive home from his office. On top of that he included an RGB LED which is displaying the current traffic situation with one color: green means everything fine, with yellow he has to expect about 10 minutes of delay and red tells him to stay in the office and to wait for the traffic jam to disappear. The enclosure is a pretty little jewelry box he repurposed for the traffic indicator. He wrote me that he plans to build a nice little steam punk case. I’m looking forward to the update once he is finished with it. He loads the traffic information from the Google Maps API for which you need to acquire an API key

Adafruit’s take on the WeatherStation Color

If you are into DIY electronics you must have come around Adafruit Industries (@Adafruit) and their founder Limor Fried AKA LadyAda. They are an open source hardware company and also contributed a lot of open source libraries for all kinds of devices. Shortly they are doing what I would love to do for a living. So you can imagine how happy I was when I found my WeatherStation Color project being presented on their page with detailed building instructions. Thank you Adafruit for sharing!
Detailed build instructions: https://learn.adafruit.com/wifi-weather-station-with-tft-display/overview