Working with substandard equipment is a difficult way to learn electronics: you get a lot of frustration with too little success. The right tool set will keep you progressing without the stressing. This tool kit contains carefully selected hand tools that will last you for many many years. This video is a walkthrough and demo of all the tools in the kit. Level up your workstation and treat yourself to a few new tools! 

This kit is priced to save you money and makes a great gift for a young electronics enthusiast or anyone whose workstation could use an upgrade.

Hi, I'm Erin St. Blaine for Adafruit, and today I'm doing a walkthrough video of Ladyada's toolkit. This is a fantastic setup for beginners or for anyone whose kit just needs an upgrade. It's got a new soldering iron, some different holders, and lots of little components and bits and bobs that will really upgrade your makerspace, so whether you're doing prototyping or repairs or just try to get to that tutorial -- that really cool one saw on the Adafruit Learning System -- this kit will really get you started and launch you to the next level, so that you can have a little less frustration and a little more success.

Let's start with the soldering iron. A good soldering can truly make or break your kit. If you can't get a good solder joint, you're not going to succeed with electronics. That's just the bottom line. So getting a nice one is really worth the investment. This one's a cool one. It's got 60 watt adjustable iron with a temperature control box so you can turn it up or down and get exactly the temperature you want, to go with the solder you're using. It comes with a general purpose conical tip, which is great for most stuff. But it is also compatible with the Hakko tips, so if you wanna swap it out with a different tip, that's really easy to do.

It also comes with this very cool solder-on-iron stand. It's nice and heavy and it has a little sponge in there already. Set it down in the stand and that's going to keep you from burning your table. It was a long time before I got myself one of these and I'm telling you, it's a game changer. 

And next up is my very favorite tool in the world. This is a pair of flush cutters. If you don't have any of these -- if you don't know how great they are -- it's time to get some. As you can see on my wall back here, I have maybe three pairs in this office, and I also have one in my tool bag, one in my shop, one in my craft room.. I think I even have one in the kitchen. They are just wonderful for cutting really close quarters or cutting anything in a tight space that you need to cut. And they're very accurate. I love these things. So it's definitely worth getting yourself a pair.

Another absolutely essential tool for any soldering kit is a good pair of wire strippers. Now, if you're still using those ones that you found in your Grandpa's garage back in 1962, well, those are going to last you for the rest of your life, but you might have more success with a new sharp pair. I like these a lot because when you squeeze them all the way, each of the holes is already measured and lined up. You can get the correct gage wire into your hole and there's no accidental cutting, like the ones where you have an adjusting screw. I like these a lot and I like to have multiple pairs of these so that if I take them out on site or something like that, I've always got a pair of wire strippers handy.

Next up, we have our solder sucker. This thing is pretty useful if you ever mess anything up or don't get it perfect on the first try. If you get extra solder someplace it doesn't need to be, you can just press on this cool little plunger, place your tip down where it needs to go and press the button and it'll suck the solder right out of your project, leaving it neat and clean for a second try.

Next, I'll show you the PCB holder. Now, this is one of those things that doesn't seem essential on your workstation, so I went for years without having anything like this. But now that I have one, I'm really excited about it. It's going to make my life so much easier. Here's how it works: you can slot a circuit board or a microcontroller or whatever into these little slots here on the top. It's got a spring-loaded action, so it's pretty easy to get the board in and out. And then, everything's adjustable. So these little knobs will open up and you can slide these up and down. And it works really well for small microcontrollers or big ones just to hold it really still so that you can solder and get the exact right spot with your work.

Next up is our multimeter. This is a really important thing to have in your kit. It allows you to sort of peek inside your project and see what's going on for troubleshooting, or figuring out how many amps or volts you're drawing. It comes with a couple of little probes and a nine-volt battery. The nine-volt battery goes inside, but it's a little tricky to figure out. You take the blue plastic case off first and then take the two bottom screws out, and then the whole thing comes apart and you can put the battery in. You want to plug the black wire into the G hole and the red wire into this the V hole if you're measuring volts or continuity and one of the two holes on the left if you're measuring amps.

The most unique part of this kit is the parts kit. So inside of here, you got a lot of different little components. There's a solderless breadboard, which is a very cool piece of equipment. It comes with some little red and green LEDs. We also got some resistors, transistors, and some switches and buttons -- basically a lot little bits so that if you're following your Adafruit tutorial and it suddenly you realize, oh my gosh, I need a 100 ohm resistor -- now you have one in the drawer. You don't have to stop your project, because I don't know about you, but all the DIY electronic stores in my neighborhood have closed. And I don't want to wait two days in order to continue my project. So having a little kit like this on hand is really clutch when it comes to getting your projects done on time with as little frustration as possible.

My favorite thing in the parts kit is this little solderless breadboard. If you know what these are, you know how cool they are, if you've never used one you're in for a treat. It's actually a lot of fun. They are made for prototyping, and all these little center holes are connected inside and then the holes along the edges are all connected to each other. So basically as you connect one hole to another with these little jumper wires, you can make a temporary electrical connection in order to test your circuit and make sure everything is going to work. 

So that's my walkthrough of Ladyada's Toolkit. The whole thing is $100, so it's a really good deal for all the stuff that you're getting. It'll really level up your game and level up your workspace. And after you get your tools, remember to check out the Adafruit Learning System for all kinds of projects and fun things to make with your new.

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