That was fun. And exhausting. All the pictures are posted above. The play by play is pretty much summed up in the pictures. I'll leave it to the others to post further impressions. For now, I'll focus on what it was like hosting this.
There was one main workstation where I do my own work. All the main instruments are on that table. I think it would be good to put all this test gear on a wheeled cart. It would save space on my main workbench, free up the table top for other duties when not used for electronics, and allow other people in the room to use the main equipment.
I put a 16"x24" baking mat down on the main station to protect the work surface. It's heat resistant to 480F, and it does hold up against liquid solder, but probably won't stand up to the heat of an iron. The mat feels sticky--not icky sticky, just plasticky sticky. Solder kind of splasehes and sticks to it, and is easily peeled off later. Thanks to rembrant for this idea
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f6/bur...9/#post5210353
A second station was a folding table and folding chair. A half-sheet 11"x17" silicon baking mat served to keep the table neat and clean and free from burns. The station also had its own power strip. For soldering, the soldering station fit on the table with enough space for a small project, solder, wire, and a small tool or two. A couple of nearby computers served as a table for equipment, in this case, just a heat gun. For equipment that isn't too heavy, a second folding table could be used instead. I have 2 Tektronix TM503 mainframes that can hold 3 pieces of equipment, and it's just perfect for this situation. I'm going to get a few more modules for future meets.
A third space--an uncomfortable corner of the desk--was for the inspection microscope: a Meiji EMZ-TR trinocular stereo microscope with the oblique viewing attachment. (The third -ocular is for the camera.) The oblique viewer lets you see stuff from pretty much any angle. It's done with mirrors. Without it, you can only see straight down. I got a cheap video camera for it, but there's obviously more to it than I know, as you can guess from the pictures. The main problem is the camera has its own idea of where to focus, which disagrees with the eyepieces by about 8". It also doesn't support zooming in any way shape or form. I think this is all a matter of getting the right lenses. Just dropping in a cheap camera works, but not optimally. The second difficulty is lighting, which I just haven't set up yet.
Setting up stations, finding tools and supplies, looking on head-fi for stragglers, and generally worrying about nothing took a fair amount of time. Of course, the worrying part is variable and possibly optional for some. For the other stuff, it would probably help to have all the tools and supplies in order in one or two known places, with everything easy to find, and clearly labelled. Then people could just find things themselves. So I need to reorganize.
Not that setting up was the big time waster. The real time killer was that we paired off for almost everything. Of course, that's a good thing, and probably the whole point of having a meet. It only means that less than half of what was planned got done, and a lot of unplanned stuff happened instead.
I think the meet went kind of well. Some good ideas were exchanged. My Grados got opened, so I can now recable them. I doubt I would ever get around to them if erikzen wasn't opening his. Not everything was successful, but some things were. We wasted a lot of time on that Dell PDA, and killed one set of cans. More important to me, we finally got a DIY meet together after years of talking about it. And that's a good thing.
