At 14:15 31-12-19, you wrote:
> On Dec 31, 2019, at 13:32, Ali via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I hate having to order 50 capacitors from
China every time I need one....
>
I ordered two from Mouser this week.
alan
One of the things I miss most is no longer having
any local electronic suppliers. Larger cities
have more, but all of the places piled high with
old electronics in Seattle in 1980's were no
longer there when last visited Seattle around
2007 or so. Vancouver has one electronics store
which, given Vancouver traffic, was at least a 1
hour drive each way. Seems that no-one is
interesting in restoring old systems or building
them anymore. The old surplus electronic stores
in Canada seemed to fade away in 1970's, but
Western Surplus in Edmonton was an excellent
place to find military surplus electronics in 1960's.
Hate online ordering as don't get a chance to
actually look at what one is getting and there's
a minimum of a few days to a week delay before
one gets the item. Living in middle of BC means
a week is closer to how long it takes. As far as
China goes, have waited months for electronics to
come from China. Really cheap, but even cheaper
if one pulls things like 16x32 multicolor LED
displays out of sale kids toys; a girls
"programmable display purse" cost less on sale at
ToysRus than buying a multicolor LED matrix new
from China (and before factoring in shipping and
duties) and after disassembly, one got a very
well manufactured multicolor LED matrix as well
as very a very shoddy, likely ARM CPU based,
board which connected to the LED matrix.
Find that online ordering results in my having an
excess of microprocessor development systems
which I still haven't used, of which the most use
in future will be Propeller proto boards as
that's my favorite CPU after PDP-11. Learned
early that don't have a few glasses of wine
before starting to order electronics online ($1500 AdaFruit order was result).
Now I just try to stock up on things that are
likely to be in short supply and that I don't
want to run out of. Current system of
immediately getting a part when one needs it very
fragile and depends on a complex transportation
system which can easily fall apart in a SHTF
situation. Also, donate old electronics to
people who will resuse them (such as out local
Makerspace which may represent a future form of
distributed manufacturing). Not having local
stocks of electronic parts available for purchase
very annoying and only solution I've found for
now is to look at what parts I'm likely to need
and order 50 of them or whatever number I get a
decent price break. Electrolytic capacitors have
a finite lifetime and would prefer to buy them
new but will just have to hope they age more slowly when not in use.
