You can get quite far with a Pinecil + additional tips (chisel tip is nice).

I have a large, powerful soldering station and I pretty much exclusively use my pinecil instead. They're wonderful little tools, and they work well up to surprisingly large circuits. If your power supply is beefy enough, you can melt quite a bit of solder with flat tip and decent contact.

Similarly I used to dislike soldering (I used really cheap irons before) and thought it was due to my technique until I bought a Pinecil. For anyone else reading I suggest getting the additional tip sets, the long red USB-C to USB-C cable and the PinePower too if you can afford it, otherwise a laptop power supply with USB-C is good too usually.

The Hakko 888 can take a big chunky tip that will usually put enough heat into a ground pin to desolder it when there is a healthy ground plane.

It is hard to get a healthy amount of thermal mass with a small iron.

Hot air and tweezers, cheap is fine.

I second all of this. As for curriculum the basics are your friend!

Understand atoms and valence electrons 1st.

Get acquainted with ohms law and…

Tackle series circuits, then parallel then series parallel with resistive loads only 2nd.

If you’re feeling ambitious move on to ac theory capacitors and inductors, transformers and get comfortable converting polar to cartesian and vice versa.

Typically diodes and then transistors next.

Thats pretty much it for the low level.

Find a book that covers this stuff and avoid maxwell and the physics approach unless at some point you want to suffer / get really deep.

Also, flux. Lots of flux and alcohol to clean it up. Flux is the key to good solder joints, that and getting comfortable creating jigs. Whatever you're soldering has to remain still while the solder sets. Let the heat and capillary action do the work.

I think for starters we should also include hot gun rework stations for desoldering and isopropyl alcohol for cleaning? Man there are so many items, I need a bigger table.

Get an isolation transformer and a cheap storage oscilloscope.

A good oscilloscope is stupid expensive but is also amazing for this type of work. I count myself lucky I have a friend who's an electrical engineer and I can borrow his work one. It makes everything so much easier.

I'm sure for someone experienced the benefit is marginal but having a bunch of probes and being able to see the waveform feels like cheating for an amateur like me.

Get old stuff. It's possible to acquire old oscilloscopes and all sorts of (once really expensive) lab equipment for free or for cheap from trash bins at universities or from the Craigslist equivalent in your country.

> A good oscilloscope is stupid expensive

They're not that bad. You can get a good entry-level oscilloscope from a company like Rigol or Siglent for ~$300.

You can get an extremely shitty one for 20 dollars https://www.instructables.com/Flea-Scope-18-Msps-13-BoM-WebU... but when you are just starting its pretty cool!

The cheapies are less useful for debugging real problems, due to their bad UI and severe limitations.

A good, fast reacting multimeter is likely better thing to get than a cheap scope.

That said the cheapies might be usable for debugging audio stuff.

I think that's probably true, but for learning stuff I think an oscilloscope is way better than a multi-meter and the cost is prohibitive so I love the flea scope to give to noobs.

I am also very much in the belief system that you should not buy an expensive tool before you are frustrated with a cheap one, most of the time people get into random hobbies and bow out six months later with way too much crap on their hands, and often time tools are more for show than for real world use.

I would add

3.5: scrap PCBs for soldering practice that you don't necessarily want to repair.