How To Order Parts from Digikey or Mouser for the Novice Electronics Hacker.
Date: Mon, February 6, 2006
So I've been learning from painful experience how to order electronics parts from Digikey. You have to be careful. I've bought surface mount capacitors no larger than grains of sand ("Oh, how cute!" a friend said...). I've bought potentiometers with 1/8" shafts, instead of 1/4" shafts (Once again, "Oh, how cute!").
If you want to order IC's (integrated circuits, you know... chips, little black caterpillars of electronicness...), make sure you get DIP packaging, some of them can also come in round metal cap packages were the pins come out the bottom in a circle (they won't easily fit in to your premade circuit board, and you'll spend quite some time making sure the right pin is going to the right hole...) There might be another letter in front of the DIP (like MDIP, PDIP), but anything with "DIP" in the packaging *should* be ok... Check the PDF spec sheet (everything in electronics has a PDF specsheet).
Capacitors and Resistors can come in a bewildering array of packages. The aformentioned surface mount packages range from hard to impossible to do for the amateur. My brother can do surface mount soldering by hand, but he used to work for Nintendo's repair department. Once again, look at the pdf spec sheet to try to find a picture. It seems that if the packaging type is 'bulk' you are pretty safe.
A good way to buy resistors for your project is to get one of the packs of resistors at... I hate to say the words.... Radio Shack. You get a whole bunch of different resistor values in the same pack, and then you'll always have some resistors lying around when you need them. You just have to put up with the [explitive deleted] salesmen for a few minutes.
Oh, and if you can never remember what brown-black-yellow stands for (like me), then use one of the resistor calculators found on the net, very very handy. Cecilia always gives me crap for being illiterate when it comes to resistors, and I always proudly proclaim, "Yes, but I'm at least functionally illiterate!". You can also use this calculator if you have a value that you need, and need the colors that go with that value...
I guess the gist of this write up is... Look at the spec sheet pdf's!
If you want to order IC's (integrated circuits, you know... chips, little black caterpillars of electronicness...), make sure you get DIP packaging, some of them can also come in round metal cap packages were the pins come out the bottom in a circle (they won't easily fit in to your premade circuit board, and you'll spend quite some time making sure the right pin is going to the right hole...) There might be another letter in front of the DIP (like MDIP, PDIP), but anything with "DIP" in the packaging *should* be ok... Check the PDF spec sheet (everything in electronics has a PDF specsheet).
Capacitors and Resistors can come in a bewildering array of packages. The aformentioned surface mount packages range from hard to impossible to do for the amateur. My brother can do surface mount soldering by hand, but he used to work for Nintendo's repair department. Once again, look at the pdf spec sheet to try to find a picture. It seems that if the packaging type is 'bulk' you are pretty safe.
A good way to buy resistors for your project is to get one of the packs of resistors at... I hate to say the words.... Radio Shack. You get a whole bunch of different resistor values in the same pack, and then you'll always have some resistors lying around when you need them. You just have to put up with the [explitive deleted] salesmen for a few minutes.
Oh, and if you can never remember what brown-black-yellow stands for (like me), then use one of the resistor calculators found on the net, very very handy. Cecilia always gives me crap for being illiterate when it comes to resistors, and I always proudly proclaim, "Yes, but I'm at least functionally illiterate!". You can also use this calculator if you have a value that you need, and need the colors that go with that value...
I guess the gist of this write up is... Look at the spec sheet pdf's!