The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

A weekly show about the trends in the electronic industry.

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#18 – Transistor Types and Where To Get Electronic Gear

  • New Segment: Workplace of the Week!
    • We’ll have a dedicated page to workplace of the week where we keep track of people that write to us.
    • Send in your pictures, what kind of work you do and anything else you’d like to tell us about your work place. The stranger the better!
    • This week was inadvertently The Riverside Robotics Class from Chattaroy Washington!
      • They had written to Dave previously and became the first chosen. We’ll post pictures later if we get any from them. They are a HS electronics club that works on robotics! Awesome to see HS students working with electronics.
    • Interested in being the next workplace of the week? Let us know!

Thanks for listening!

Comments

  1. We do get the more news-ish bits of NPR in Australian Radio via our governmnet funded public broadcaster the ABC. ABC news radio pretty much does Australian News then BBC news then NPR news. NPR do produce great stuff. I used to stream stuff off their website before there was ITunes.

    Futurlec have a decent collection of breakout boards. I ordered a bunch from them a little while ago. As Dave said, they’re slow and it’s now been over a month since i made that order. I think maybe they ship out of Thailand. I don’t know why they bother with the “local presence” thing.

    I have the two transistor equivalents books that have been sold by Jaycar for many years. And i still consult them from time to time. Theyre also good for older transistors that may never have made it to pdf online. From the books you can get the likely vitals for the transistor as well as the pinout.
    Transistor types: i tend to use BC547, BC557, BC337, BC847, BC857, BC807 and BC817 for general purpose switching. This idea of transistor model/make popularity by geography is interesting. Digikey should do map overlays of amounts of components and where the orders originated from.

    On requirements and moving goal posts. This is really difficult. You can lock down a requirements agreement with a client so that they’ll pay for what has been agreed to. On the other hand, you hear about people who are about to battle it out with lawyers because someone disagreed with requirement/product parity.
    What do you do when it’s your boss moving goal posts? You can remind a superior of the requirements document but it doesn’t mean much if your superiors decide it just has to be changed.
    Unfortunately, requirements are more inclusive than exclusive so it’s more likely for extras to sneak in than for bits to be left out.

    Revisiting goals and requirements frequently during a project especially if it goes on for a while is important. Involving the client/boss and attempting to demonstrate how you are going about fulfilling requirements helps.

    At first opportunities, even in the planning/ proposal stage, I like to try to cobble together “paper thin prototypes” (i’m talking hardware here). It doesn’t have to work. It doesn’t have to look quite right. It does provide a way of allowing those involved in the project to get their ideas and expectations across. You can sketch and list things as well but there’s something about holding, turning and pointing at bits of a three dimensional object that gets everyone closer to being on the same page.

    On microcontroller projects where firmware is involved, if there’s real estate and i/o pins available, i’ll include extra footprints for switches or jumper links. Or footprints for indicator LEDs or transistor driver circuits. Even if it’s not required for version 1, someone will ask for an optional feature once they see what version 1 does. If i’m lucky they can be implemented with the extra footprints without redesigning the board.

    I’d be intereseted to hear what people think about “blue wire hacks” for delivering a version 2. Everyone likes a clean nice looking product but are blue wire hacks acceptable? I’m not talking about repairs or rework, i’m talking about cutting tracks and running wires as a modification to add functionailty to a version 1 board and present it as a version 2 product. Maybe not in the wider commercial electronics space but is this acceptable in niche markets? Even if it’s unlikely that anyone will open the enclosure if it’s in one?

    btw i was just getting into the embedded.com forums when EEtimes reinvented the site and the forums disappeared. Did this happen for all of the other EETimes forums at the time as well?

    JD

  3. Hmm, I just posted a comment with three links to Mightyohm’s discussion and wiki pages about “where to buy electronics”. Did the comment end up in some spam filter?

  4. For us Torontonians, we have the Sayal, Electrosonic and Active 123 which are more like the department stores of electronics. However, they are all located in places which are hard to reach unless you have a car.

    For those of us who walk/bike/take the transit, there is the Home Hardware at College/Spadina which used to be Supremtronics and Creatron. You can litterally walk into these places and pick up RLCs and transistors from walls of drawers and it is quite a useful resource if you need to quickly get something done. The man who runs Creatron is Lawrence and he tends to be helpful. If you get him started, he will talk about his days when he worked as a repairman for HP Agilent.

    As for surplus stuff, Active Surplus is a favourite with a second (larger) store now. A1 Parts is lesser known but they have more of the Apex Electronics feel.

    If you need mechanical hardware, Jacob’s Hardware (Queen/Spadina) is a surprisingly good place to find stuff. They have stock material, fasteners, tools, etc at good prices (often lower than Home Depot) and have fast and friendly service. I highly recommend that you check them out.

  6. What about the other side of the coin… where to sell parts and used equipment to?

    I’ve got (bulky) working test equipment, and huge reels of ICs/resistors that would be a pain to ship…

    I’ve tried Craigslist several times, but never got so much as a single inquiry.. I’d hate to toss it as I believe some of this stuff has gotta be worth *SOMETHING* to someone:

    (2) LakeShore 218 Temperature Monitor
    Microchip PIC18LF4320 PIC Microcontroller *LOT OF 100*
    Texas Instruments TMS320VC5510 TI DSP **LOT OF 36**
    Xilinx XC2C512 CoolRunner-II CPLD **LOT OF 25**
    AMD MACH210-12JC **LOT OF 8**

    Any suggestions?

    • Where abouts are you?
      You could put all of the components into one ebay listing and sell it as a ‘lot’. There are mail order companies that pick up stuff like that. At least you’d only have to ship one (or a few) large boxes.

      I do know the feeling though. I have about 20,000 1SMB18AT3 18V zeners (smt) and I have no real idea where to get rid of them.

  7. Jaycar sounds like Maplin Electronics here in the UK. Started out as a mail order components place and now has 100+ shops around the UK. I think the component range is about 1/4 that it was though, pushed into the back room store by RC aircraft, disco lights and yeah farting things. I really hope they start to stock Arduino stuff, it is a great cross-market product.

    Talking of analogue valves (tubes). Most of them hardly glow at all now. Those expensive hyper-fi valve amps are illuminated with LEDs. You can even get motherboards with valve audio drivers. Google for AOpen AX4B.

  8. I am lucky, because there is a huge electronics parts supplier not far away. They have a pretty extensive catalog that you can order from, but with it only being a 45 Min drive, I often just ride out to their store-front. A 2-hr trip is def better than shipping most times 😉

  9. You said you both would like to design a product and sell it. Those are two completely different areas. You also mentioned order fulfillment, which is yet another area. Would you be more inclined to buy a product and sell the design to someone who like to handle sales, support, and fulfillment. Or would you rather purchases a cool design, maybe tweak it a little, and then handle the marketing and logistics yourself.

    There are engineers out there with cool products going who don’t have the time or knowledge to market them. Getting sales is the part of the process that usually (not always) pays the most.

    If I were designing my own product, I would ask myself what are the next steps I would take if the product were completely done. I would also ask if some engineer might have it mostly done, but not productized, and be willing to sell the design for $200.