What tools do I need?

Since you are looking at a web store selling various kits and components for building electronics, it's very likely you will need some tools for building them right about now.

So, what tools do you actually need, and how much of your budget should you spend on them? What tools are worth the extra money, and where can you skimp?

The list

Bare neccesities

These are the tools you can most likely find laying around the house, or ask a relative to borrow. Cheap works, as long as they are the right size for the job.

• Screwdrivers - Here you can skimp a fair bit. The most basic ones will do really, as long as you get the right size/type. Find
• Pliers - Bad pliers are plain and simple annoying, get a decent set of needle nose pliers or bent pliers in small to medium size. Find
• Side cutter / Wire cutter - A good medium sized general purpose one, and a very good micro one makes it so much easier. Medium, Micro

The slightly more advanced

These tools are needed if you solder or deal with smaller items. Most of them are sort of cheap, but good quality helps. Spend a little more.

• Precision Screwdriver - For small jobs. Spend more, a good precision screwdriver is a lot easier work with, the tips last longer, and it's less 'clunky'. Find
• Hobby knife/Scalpel or small Exacto knife - A scalpel is preffereable, but a cheap exacto knife with a new blade works well enough.Find
• Tweezers - A set of good ESD safe tweezers makes fiddly work a lot easier. Find
• Wire stripper - Sort of a speciality tool, and you can do the same thing with a good sidecutter and/or knife in a pinch, but worth it. Find

Start soldering

The soldering tools are where you will have to spend some money. Cheap tools might work, but they will undoubtedly make things difficult, especially if you are a beginner and are learning, good tools here make a huge difference in how fast you learn and how many things you break while learning. Spend!

• Soldering Iron / Soldering Station - See below.
• Solder Wick/Braid - A solder wick, or desoldering braid is meant to clean up solder bridges on small solders, like legs on a MCU. Find
• Solder Pump - Actually not interchangeable with above. Meant to remove lots of tin from a larger solder. Not that great at cleanup. Soldapullt, Generic
• Soldering wire/Tin - Lead free is a no-brainer health wise. And there are formulaes that solder well at decent temps, instead of the 'old' variants. Weller, Generic
• Flux Pen - Trust me, it helps more than you think! Find
• Plastic Brush - An old toothbrush actually works well, but an ESD safe brush is better. Find

A basic soldering iron vs a soldering station

Why should you pick a more expensive soldering station or an advanced soldering pen vs a cheap but 'good' basic soldering iron? Well a soldering tool that allows you to set the temperature of the tip with reasonable accuracy makes soldering a lot easier, especially if you are a beginner. And having the right tip size/shape for the type of soldering you are trying to do also helps immensely. And then having the ability to swap out the tips relatively easily, to switch from heating up a larger wire or copper pad, to soldering small and delicate things like RGB LED's, that's a literal game changer.

Very basic, cheap and 'good enough'

Decent, a bit spendier, hotswap tips

Spendy

A Multimeter

A basic multimeter is more or less a requirement to basic fault finding/diagnostic of all electronics, and especially when building a kit. Most very basic one's work very well, and for the purpose it's not really an issue if the accuracy isn't that good, as you are simply measuring voltage or no voltage, or connection or no connection. What might be worth a little more, is better (auto) settings, and the ability to check diodes.

Basic, 'good enough'

Autoranging

Autoranging, diode test

Please Note!

All the links are searches with basic parameters, and not all products will inherently match the paramters, due to bad search, or (intentially?) bad key words from the seller. Please verify that the product description matches the intended search, and is represented in a reasonable way. Also, best practice is to avoid the cheapest 1 results in your search, or at least treat them with some distrust if considerably cheaper then the rest.