I sat down today to go through the book and start building a shopping list - I was hoping to be able to buy a large portion of the required components from a single source. That's not going to happen.
It's very aggravating... sites like mouser.com seem to have everything but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack to find exactly what you want - you can't go by the picture and sifting through dozens of data sheets gets old really fast.
Then you find sites like allelectronics.com that have the sorriest search engines around. To top it off, I wasn't finding anything I needed on allelectronics and shut down that website completely after about 4 or 5 dead end searches.
The most success I had was at sparkfun.com - I found a large percentage of the parts I need (at least up through Project 23, I think) and placed an order to save on shipping. I've updated the Projects Spreadsheet with this purchase. It may look random and it likely is... there are still a LOT of holes left between Project 8 and Project 23.
Two of the most difficult items to find are the 8x8 Dot Matrix Displays that will come later in the book - one is common anode and the other is common cathode. I finally managed to track them down from kingbrightusa.com but the shipping alone is more than the combined price of the 2 items. I hate when that happens. I'll ask my readers to please help if they find a cheaper/alternative location for these parts... I just don't want to spend hours and hours trying to save $0.50 or so here and there on components and I don't want to drive all over Atlanta looking for parts.
On the Projects Spreadsheet, I've included all the parts #s and prices... hope that helps some of you.
More shopping lists to come, I'm sure...
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I ordered most of the needed components, particularly the ICs and sensors from Jameco, filling in just a few items from Sparkfun. I think I only came up short on some eeprom chips that I ended up ordering from Digi-Key and was fortunate there that someone else I knew was placing a large Digi-Key order and let me piggy back for a share of the shipping.
ReplyDeleteHandy as the internet may be, it's good to know some local people who play with electronics for just this reason...although in my case "local" is still a minimum of 30 miles away.
I already had a motor shield from Adafruit, which I bought as part of her "Motor Party Kit" and came with some servos and a stepper and dc brush motor. I'm holding off on some of the other shields and breakout boards because I have plans to move in a different direction with a robotics project, specifically this http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/index.php/rc-home.
On the 8x8 LED arrays, I'd earlier purchased a bag of 200, so I found a schematic for the arrays and probably will just make my own on perfboard, although it's kind of a fussy job.
Having been through most of the Platt book the electronics here is pretty simple. My problem is figuring out the code.
Why not try my own site? ;)
ReplyDeletewww.earthshineelectronics.com
Live and learn :) Will check out Earthshine for next order.
ReplyDeleteJim