Arduino - There is the endless debate about exactly what board the beginner should start with, but as far as I'm concerned, the Arduino answered the "first" board question and closed the book. Now, once you start getting more advanced, you will want to move off the Arduino to more specific boards, but you have to start somewhere. Make sure to get the non-surface mount Arduino unless you have to, because replacing damaged SMT chips is a pain, where replacing damaged DIPs is trivial.

USBtinyISP - Once you want to start making more AVR ATMegas to plug into your Arduino, or want to move to smaller AVRs like the Tiny2313 or Tiny85, or bigger chips like the Mega1284, you're going to need an in-circuit-serial-programmer to plug into the 2x3 header you see on your Arduino and elsewhere. The Adafruit kit is only $20, and works perfectly well for hobbyist applications.

Once you get on your feet on the Arduino, the number of possibilities really opens up. Do you stay with AVRs, or move to other architectures, such as:

PICs using the PICkit. PICs were the 8 bit behemoth before the Arduino came in and took the hobbyist market by storm.



MSP430 using the Launchpad. MSP430s are a very wide line of 16 bit controllers, but suffer from the disadvantage compared to many PICs and AVRs that it only runs on 3.3 volts, not 5V.



8051 - The 8051 is a classic microcontroller architecture you'll find in tons of places you don't expect it. Probably the most popular hobbyist application of 8051s is the TI CC111x chips in things such as the IM-ME. The programmer I use is the GoodFET, which I happen to sell assembled here.



The list goes on, with all kinds of other architectures like ARM and other vendor-specific controllers.

The classic beginner general-purpose op-amp you'll probably see others using is the 741, but it is actually a really poor op-amp. Schools love to use it because it demonstrates almost everything that can go wrong with an op-amp. You should probably stock more recent models, which are just as cheap, such as the LM324 or TL072/82 for higher end work.

386 - This is a great amplifier when you really don't need an entire op-amp, but just want to make some audio signal LOUDER. Bypass capacitors between the power lines is a must, because this chip tends to be unstable and "motorboat" if the power rails aren't filtered properly.

LM339 - This is a comparator chip, which is essentially an op-amp with the gain turned all the way up so it just tells you whether one signal is higher than another.

If you really do start trying to build analog circuits, this is the time to buy a complete resistor and capacitor kit, because it will drive you nuts when you need to increase a capacitance by 10% and you only have three different size capacitors.

The equipment you need to get started in building electronics.If you look back through the last two years of posts on this blog, you'll see my relatively rapid transition from absolute beginner in electronics to someone who is formidable enough to have their work at least noticed ( See HaD every other month ). This means I've been fielding a lot of questions from beginners online as to how exactly to get started, and what to buy, and what to do with it. And to answer this, I keep having to pull up the same links to the basic stuff.So lets say you're just getting into electronics and want to get really serious about it, or you're decently far into electronics and just want to see another person's parts shortlist, or you're me and my apartment burnt down right now and I have to restock my entire shop. What to buy?The obvious beginner answers are the juggernaut kits from places like the Maker Shed, and I will never knock them for putting together a perfectly reasonable starter kit (which despite your intuition, is actually reasonably priced ), but I've never been really interested in them. To drop $120 in one sitting on a kit which is half useful stuff and half stuff I don't explicitly need right now? Meh. I can appreciate the utility of someone else putting it all together for you when you have no idea what you need, but I'm much more of the opinion that I'll be happier sourcing the specific parts I want individually.So here is a gigantic list of everything I would buy right now to replace my entire workshop if mine were to disappear. I'm going to try and separate it into some sort of reasonable order as far as importance, but the point is that you see all of this, and use it as inspiration to put together your own collection.- Online references will get you far, but the internet still can't beat the cohesiveness of a well-put-together book.- This is where it gets a little hard because you can spend $20 on a soldering iron, and you can spend $10,000 on a soldering iron. I'm going to try to recommend you get second shelf equipment, because the cheap stuff will just waste your time and be frustrating, but understandably, we're just hobbyists.- I personally live in the AVR and MSP430 camps, but the choice to get into developing on PIC, or 8051, or ARM, or anything else, is completely arbitrary.- This is where we really get to what I have in my boxes of electronics. More than anything else, this is defined by what type of electronics or projects your working on. The best way to stock this, is to put together shopping lists for each project and then just buy 5x what you need. Eventually you collect enough stuff that you can just sit down and build.My collection has spiraled to 8 12" Digikey boxes, so this is obviously not everything I own, but after getting this, almost any project will only be a few specific parts away from being doable. If you're going for diversity, you might be able to beat out the passives with entire kits , but I just prefer to buy the individual values I want. Living in the Silicon Valley means I usually get most of these at salvage electronics stores in the area, which means a lot of the passives come in $1 hundred-count bags, but I'll link to Digikey to make your life as a nebulous internet reader easier.- Where everything before this was pretty general, this is where my emphasis in digital electronics becomes apparent.- I admittedly don't do much analog work, but these are the basics when you want to get into it.Now of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as electronics really goes. There are so many different directions to go with the hobby, and so many parts to do it with, no list will cover all of it. I would never expect you to sit down and buy all of this at once, so use this list as more of an inspirational list than a shopping list. You don't need anywhere near all of this to get started, but you'll find you'll tend to collect most of it over a matter of years in the hobby. If reading through this there are any glaring omissions of classic beginner parts, make sure to drop me a tip in the comments!