Your kit

The honest version. What you must own, what the department lends you, what is worth buying later, and what not to waste money on.

Prices are indicative, in Hong Kong dollars, for reasonable-quality tools bought locally or online. Divide by roughly eight for US dollars.

Must own, before Class 2#

A multimeter — HK$300 to HK$900#

The one tool you cannot borrow, because you will use it every week and because getting to know one instrument well is worth more than access to a better one occasionally.

What matters:

• A fused current range. Non-negotiable. An unfused meter placed across a supply in current mode is a short circuit with no protection, and the fault is usually a hand near an explosion. Check the specification says fused, and open it to see the fuse before you trust it.
• A CAT rating of CAT III 600 V or better, printed on the meter and, ideally, from a manufacturer whose claim means something. A CAT rating on a fifty-dollar meter is often decorative.
• True RMS, if you can stretch to it. Almost nothing in a modern theatre draws a clean sine wave, and an averaging meter will be wrong by twenty to forty per cent on a dimmer or a switching supply. Worth the difference.
• Continuity with a fast beeper. A slow one makes cable testing tedious, so you stop doing it properly.
• Decent leads. Silicone leads stay flexible in the cold and do not crack. Bad leads are the most common cause of a wrong reading.

Worth having but not essential: capacitance, frequency, temperature with a thermocouple, and a non-contact voltage detector built in.

Do not buy: anything under about HK$150, anything with no fuse, or anything whose specification page does not mention a CAT rating at all.

Side cutters and strippers — HK$150 to HK$400#

Flush cutters, small, for component leads. And proper wire strippers with sized notches, not a knife and not the combined plier type.

A knife nicks strands, and a nicked strand is a cable that fails in week six, at the connector, during a performance. This is the cheapest failure in this list to prevent.

Small screwdrivers — HK$150#

A set of precision flat and Phillips, plus a mains-rated flat and Phillips for terminals. The mains-rated ones have insulation up to the tip and are marked with a rating.

Safety glasses — HK$80#

The department has them. Yours will fit better and therefore you will wear them.

A notebook — HK$40#

Paper, A5, hard covered. It becomes the record of every measurement you take for sixteen weeks and it is the artefact the capstone assesses your method through.

Must own, before Class 4#

A soldering iron — HK$400 to HK$1,200#

You can use the department's during class. Owning one is what makes you good at soldering, because skill comes from the joints you make outside the four hours a week.

What matters:

• Temperature control, with a number on it. Not "hi/lo", not a plain 30 W stick. Different joints need different temperatures and you cannot learn what a good joint feels like on an iron whose temperature wanders.
• Fast recovery. The tip must return to temperature quickly when it touches a heat sink, or every joint on a connector shell is a cold joint.
• Interchangeable tips, and buy a chisel tip immediately. The conical tip most irons ship with is the worst general-purpose shape, and beginners struggle for weeks with it before discovering that a 2.4 mm chisel transfers heat properly.

A TS100, a Pinecil, or an entry-level Hakko station are all fine. The USB-C powered ones are genuinely good and very portable.

Solder — HK$150#

0.7 mm or 0.8 mm, rosin cored. Learn on leaded 60/40 if your institution permits it: it wets better and gives clearer visual feedback, which matters when you are learning to judge a joint. Move to lead-free afterwards, knowing that a duller finish is normal rather than a fault.

A helping hand or small vice — HK$100 to HK$300#

Any arrangement that holds the work so both your hands are free. A joint you are holding is a joint that moves while it cools, and a joint that moves while it cools is a cold joint.

Heatshrink assortment — HK$100#

Adhesive-lined for anything that will be handled. It costs a little more and it seals.

The department lends you#

You do not need to buy these, and you should learn what they cost so you can specify them later.

Worth buying once you know you want to#

A microcontroller board — HK$40 to HK$300#

An Arduino Uno or Nano clone is fine for Class 11 and 12. An ESP32 gives you Wi-Fi and far more processing for about the same money and a slightly steeper start.

Buy two. You will destroy one, and it is better to destroy one on purpose in Class 11 than by accident the night before a deadline.

A breadboard and jumper kit — HK$150#

A half-size breadboard, a set of male-to-male jumpers, and a set of male-to-female for sensors.

A component starter kit — HK$300#

Resistors in E12 values, common capacitors, LEDs, diodes, transistors, headers. Cheaper as a kit than individually, and having parts on hand is the difference between building the idea tonight and not building it.

A logic analyser — HK$100#

The cheap eight-channel USB ones with open-source software are genuinely useful and absurdly cheap. For decoding serial, I²C, SPI and DMX they are better than an entry-level scope.

A label printer — HK$400#

Sounds like an indulgence. It is the tool that most changes how professional your work looks and how maintainable it is, and Class 10 is where you find that out.

What not to waste money on#

• A cheap unfused multimeter. Not a cheaper version of a good meter. A different product that looks similar and has no protection between you and the fault.
• A soldering iron without temperature control. You will replace it within a month, having learned bad habits on it.
• A "DMX Y-splitter" from a marketplace listing. A passive Y-piece creates reflection paths and intermittent faults. Splitting DMX needs an active splitter. Class 9 explains why in detail.
• A very expensive scope, early. A cheap scope you own and use beats an excellent one you book out twice a term. The department has the good ones.
• Anything advertised as "professional grade" with no specification. The specification is the claim. A page of adjectives is not.
• A soldering fume extractor with a plain sponge filter. Either get one with real activated carbon, or open a window and use a desk fan, which costs nothing and works better than a token filter.

The total#

Call it HK$1,500 minimum to do the course properly, and about HK$3,000 for a kit you will still be using in five years. Every item on the required list is a tool you will own for a decade.

If cost is a genuine barrier, say so before Class 2. There are department loan sets and it is a short conversation, and it is a much better conversation than the one where somebody buys an unfused meter because it was the affordable one.