Your latest purchase (August 20th to February 11th)

Just went christmas shopping... Bought my bro the Xbox 360 controller he wanted. D

(don't worry, he doesn't read arduino)

Used ham radio transceiver from local Ham for $100. Very nice condition and works great. It's 30+ year old unit, but built like a battleship (around 40 pounds) and very collectable/maintainable/repairable. The whole front panel is made of die cast metal. Receive functions are AOK so far as there is a ham radio contest going on today (SSB sweepstakes) and I'm hearing hundreds of stations from all over the country. Can't check out the transmit functions till I get my resistors in the mail to build a dummy load for practicing tuning (dipping/loading) the final amplifier pi-network output stage , for about 100 watts output.

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=kenwood+ts-520s&hl=en&sa=X&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS373US373&biw=1039&bih=696&tbm=isch&prmd=imvns&tbnid=bpl8sVFm3TmfdM:&imgrefurl=http://www.universal-radio.com/used/sold027.html&docid=sI0I6WIu8hopUM&imgurl=http://www.universal-radio.com/used/uc99lrg.jpg&w=720&h=378&ei=rZrITvDtIaWhiQKW243SDw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=680&vpy=300&dur=62&hovh=163&hovw=310&tx=158&ty=76&sig=108332181031703398911&page=1&tbnh=119&tbnw=227&start=0&ndsp=12&ved=1t:429,r:11,s:0

Lefty

bill2009:

I have half a dozen wire stripper variants but I still end up putzing with an exacto half the time. I bought this on spec but it works really well, even on quite short pieces of loose wire and on tough ribbon cable. It doesn't have slots or spots for different sizes of wire, I guess it counts on insulation being a particular thickness and not too compressible. so far no sign of damage to the wire.

I've been using this thing for a while and it continues to impress me. Today I tried it on 30 gauge wire wrap wire which has thin tough insulation and it did an excellent job. No more digging out my old soldering iron for this - woohoo!

Bought 2 10' iPhone cables, and 2 2 amp iPad chargers off ebay... Already got the cables (3 days later) and they work great! Cost me $3 each, compared to the $30 each that high quality ones (Griffin Technology) cost.

50pcs BSS138. SOT23 N-channel logic level mosfets. Just 3€ including shipping :wink:

I will use these for small LED projects when a little more current is required and using a full blown LED driver would still be overkill.

I saw Swan digital wireless security camera and receiver kits on sale @Dick Smith, so I bought one for my Rover 5!
The video link is a bit "choppy" but there is NO interference from WiFi, XBee or Bluetooth.
And the built in infrared illuminator works well.

Some of these interesting-looking protoshields, with assorted other random/standard stuff from elecfreaks:

@westfw: I'd really like to hear from you how you liked/disliked these proto-boards.

Now some additions to the list of recent purchases:

  • 50pcs AO3401, SOT-23, P-FET, 30V, 4A
  • 100pcs TC33X-2, SMD potentiometer, 2k
  • 10pcs pcb order (rev-a of a little project), ordered at seeedstudio
  • 10pcs pcb order (rev-b of the same project), ordered at iteadstudio

I'm really glad we now have access to such great pcb manufacturing deals. Otherwise I couldn't afford to send out the rev-b design before actually having received the rev-a boards :wink: The only problem that now arises is what to do with all of the prototype boards... They can't always be re-purposed and put to good use. Maybe I should start nailing them to walls.

The "usual", a bunch of 10 pcs PCB orders from seeed studio and 25 ATMEGA328P-PU's (this time from mouser). Hope to get the PCBs before New Year. Start building low-cost teaching equipment with them soon.

Mouser disappointed me. I bought 25 ATMEGA328P-PUs and they mailed in the right amount the right model in two tubes: One of them is cut just a bit too short to hold 11 chips and a hole was punched on the end that ripped off on top and bottom because it was punched too close to the cut-off end. One chip is hanging half outside that open end since the rip narrowed the end to hold the chip there. There is no plastic pin to be found in the sealed antistatic bag indicating the plastic pin was gone before the bag was sealed, how unprofessional?! Saved $6 for 25 chips, compared with digikey, which always packs well. Anyone else with better experience with them?

Just emailed them. I'll see what they have to say.

I've never had an problems with orders from Mouser...

I received the flower board from Elecfreaks to make a review. I will make the review in the coming days and will post a link here.

@wortelsoft: Good to hear that.

@liudr: I haven't had any issues with Mouser directly (only one data point so far - only SMD chips involved --> tray), but with the delivery company they chose. It was some sort of express service (who knows why they used it) - and they weren't able to locate me ;-( I had to give them a call to arrange for a 2nd delivery attempt, and they were quite surprised/annoyed that I even had the tracking number... "Where did YOU get that from?". And so far I've also not had to fill in any forms like "do you build nukes with it?", "how many will you be purchasing in the future..." and so forth. Dave L. Jones always seems to have to do that with digikey :wink: Maybe that's an extra service for Down Under.

Update to the mouser shipping mishap: I emailed them and they promptly agreed to ship one extra chip to me with no charge. That was decent and quick. Next time I will consider ordering whole tubes. Do they always come with tubes of 14 chips per tube?

That would depend on the tubes :wink:

The only ones I have would fit about 6 DIP-28 chips, but I got these when I ordered a couple of DIP-18 chips somewhere else.

IMGP5170-2.JPG

Mine are all baring ATMEL name and stuff. Only one tube is generic and a bit shorter. The bottom one is from atmel and was cut too short.

As promised the review of the flower protoboard can be found here:

www.wortelsoft.nl/english/FlowerProto.html

Are these flower-pads solder-mask defined or etched?

I still wonder if using simple square pads wouldn't work equally well.

The pads are etched, I'm also wondering about the square pads. But I don't have that type of protoboard to be able to compare. Maybe the leaves wil give a better separation between for instance the top and left if you only want to connect a pad to the left and not the one above.