Asklemmy

43962 readers

1413 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

704

What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by plactagonic@sopuli.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

801 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.

Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] colonial@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm not really the right guy to ask - I don't have that much soldering experience, and I'm a broke college student - but I've found the Pinecil to be Pretty Good™ for my use case of "occasionally soldering things to microcontrollers."

It accepts power over USB-C, so no need for a bulky (and expensive) base station like a Hakko or Weller. (You do need an AC adapter capable of pushing 65W PD, but if you're into electronics you probably already have something like that just lying around.) Proper temperature control is also nice compared to the cheap "plug and go" irons.

YMMV, I upgraded to it from a Home Depot butane iron (yes it was as bad as it sounds) so...

[–] dack@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pinecil works OK for small things, but struggles on larger joints because of it's low power and small thermal mass. Personally, I'd prefer one of the many Hakko/Weller clones for a cheap solution.

[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Thermal mass is a valid concern, but the v2 can pull 100w from an appropriatly beefy usb-c adapter, and 200w+ from one on the new usb-pd spec (testing is ongoing for that though)