I’ve recently started building my own workbench at home, and I just turned my first board out after solder paste reflow using a rework station. It was beautiful. I did not have a few components required (the design was based off sparkfun’s breakout for the MAX30105), so I winged it a bit. Pullup resistors are not 4.7k, but 5.1k and a few decoupling caps were 10uF instead of 11. The circuit itself simply has two bidirectional level converters, and a 1.8V voltage regulator acting as peripherals to the pulse oximeter chip.

A couple of things I still need to work on though

• Getting an ESD safe bracelet and mat
• Which is also heat resistant – I almost burnt the wood on the table I was working on.
• Get a smoke evacuator AKA not die of lead poisoning/cancer.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of making my workbench accessible to people with open source electronics. Something similar to pro-bono work.