With the kind of international membership AAC has, it is interesting to see some of the different ways people have -- and limitations they face -- when getting electronic components. So I'm curious to find out what it is like where you are.
I'll start.
Clearly I'm in the U.S. and this is the view from where I typically operate (which may or may not be typical for others).
Getting electronic parts used to be really easy (a decade or two ago) because there were both chain stores (like Radio Shack) and tons of electronic surplus stores (Denver had a dozen or so) around and they all had a pretty good selection of the run-of-the-mill stuff that you might need as a hobbyist. Radio Shack was expensive, but they had it. Surplus stores were cheap, but you might play hell finding it.
Now it is much harder to find a place where you can walk in and buy this stuff. The Denver metro area doesn't have any surplus stores that I am aware of. There is one in Colorado Springs (OEM Parts, but it is a shadow of its former self) and one up in the northern part of the state (JB Saunders, I think). Radio Shack is worthless unless you want to sign up for a phone.
For me, Digi-Key and Mouser are my primary resources. They have HUGE selections and very high in-stock rates for the parts they stock (they are also an ordering point for lots of non-stocked parts). They are competent and easy to work with and they ship the same day. But they are not cheap, though their onezy prices have gotten a lot more competitive than they were twenty years ago.
Then there are (were, I don't know which ones are still around or how they have evolved) places like Allied and Marshall who were volume distributors and had a much larger selection of components than Digi-Key and Mouser (not nearly the case now as Digi-Key and Mouser carry just about everything on the planet, it seems) and had much better prices, but you almost could never by anything in low quantities and often had to buy 1000 or more (maybe 50 for something expensive). But sometimes you got lucky and they had a broken lot that they would sell individual units from.
Then there were the engineering samples from the manufacturers. It was amazing the range of parts you could get them to send you for free. I've gotten $100+ parts (I think my personal record was a part that was about $300 and of which they sent two of them) and some places would just routinely FedEx them overnight to you. It actually made sense -- they knew that the Digi-Key/Mouser types didn't stock them and they knew the Allied/Marshall types were going to insist you by lots of them. So to get people to design around their components, the manufacturers needed to supply samples pretty liberally. But while I know sampling still happens, I think it has been greatly curtailed, in part because now the Digi-Key/Mouser folks make most things available in single-quantities. But also, like everything, lots of computing power means lots of bureaucracy -- before I would call up Motorola or National, talk to an applications engineer and ask if they could sample me this or that, then that person would go pull the samples, put them in an envelope and handwrite the address on it and throw it in the mail. Now it's all computerized and official and layered with rules and policies and procedures.
So what did all this mean for me as a student/hobbyist/engineer?
As a student and hobbyist, my time was cheap but money was scarce. So I hated Digi-Key and spent hours going to surplus stores or ripping old equipment apart to scavenge parts.
As an engineer, I very quickly learned that my time was valuable and that money was relatively cheap. If I spent an hour trying to find a place that would sell me a part for $50 that Digi-Key sold for $80, I had just cost the company money. So when I needed parts (generally for test systems to test an IC coming back from fab) I pulled out the Digi-Key catalog and if they carried it, I ordered it from them because the degree to which I knew they would have what I needed made their prices a bargain. And, of course, Digi-Key knew this, which is why they went to great lengths to have stock on virtually everything in their catalog.
But the bottom line -- and I apologize for the tome -- is that in the U.S. we are very fortunate because we have easy access to a large fraction of the components we might want or need and we seldom have to look at more than a few places to find it and we can get it in our hands in only a day or two if we need it badly enough. Or, we can spend more time and effort and get stuff cheaper, but those options do seem to be drying up here because the surplus industry has largely died.
So what's it like in the rest of the world? Would you classify your ability to get electronic parts as easy, okay as long as it's something real common, or impossible unless you can strip it out of something you find on the side of the road?
I'll start.
Clearly I'm in the U.S. and this is the view from where I typically operate (which may or may not be typical for others).
Getting electronic parts used to be really easy (a decade or two ago) because there were both chain stores (like Radio Shack) and tons of electronic surplus stores (Denver had a dozen or so) around and they all had a pretty good selection of the run-of-the-mill stuff that you might need as a hobbyist. Radio Shack was expensive, but they had it. Surplus stores were cheap, but you might play hell finding it.
Now it is much harder to find a place where you can walk in and buy this stuff. The Denver metro area doesn't have any surplus stores that I am aware of. There is one in Colorado Springs (OEM Parts, but it is a shadow of its former self) and one up in the northern part of the state (JB Saunders, I think). Radio Shack is worthless unless you want to sign up for a phone.
For me, Digi-Key and Mouser are my primary resources. They have HUGE selections and very high in-stock rates for the parts they stock (they are also an ordering point for lots of non-stocked parts). They are competent and easy to work with and they ship the same day. But they are not cheap, though their onezy prices have gotten a lot more competitive than they were twenty years ago.
Then there are (were, I don't know which ones are still around or how they have evolved) places like Allied and Marshall who were volume distributors and had a much larger selection of components than Digi-Key and Mouser (not nearly the case now as Digi-Key and Mouser carry just about everything on the planet, it seems) and had much better prices, but you almost could never by anything in low quantities and often had to buy 1000 or more (maybe 50 for something expensive). But sometimes you got lucky and they had a broken lot that they would sell individual units from.
Then there were the engineering samples from the manufacturers. It was amazing the range of parts you could get them to send you for free. I've gotten $100+ parts (I think my personal record was a part that was about $300 and of which they sent two of them) and some places would just routinely FedEx them overnight to you. It actually made sense -- they knew that the Digi-Key/Mouser types didn't stock them and they knew the Allied/Marshall types were going to insist you by lots of them. So to get people to design around their components, the manufacturers needed to supply samples pretty liberally. But while I know sampling still happens, I think it has been greatly curtailed, in part because now the Digi-Key/Mouser folks make most things available in single-quantities. But also, like everything, lots of computing power means lots of bureaucracy -- before I would call up Motorola or National, talk to an applications engineer and ask if they could sample me this or that, then that person would go pull the samples, put them in an envelope and handwrite the address on it and throw it in the mail. Now it's all computerized and official and layered with rules and policies and procedures.
So what did all this mean for me as a student/hobbyist/engineer?
As a student and hobbyist, my time was cheap but money was scarce. So I hated Digi-Key and spent hours going to surplus stores or ripping old equipment apart to scavenge parts.
As an engineer, I very quickly learned that my time was valuable and that money was relatively cheap. If I spent an hour trying to find a place that would sell me a part for $50 that Digi-Key sold for $80, I had just cost the company money. So when I needed parts (generally for test systems to test an IC coming back from fab) I pulled out the Digi-Key catalog and if they carried it, I ordered it from them because the degree to which I knew they would have what I needed made their prices a bargain. And, of course, Digi-Key knew this, which is why they went to great lengths to have stock on virtually everything in their catalog.
But the bottom line -- and I apologize for the tome -- is that in the U.S. we are very fortunate because we have easy access to a large fraction of the components we might want or need and we seldom have to look at more than a few places to find it and we can get it in our hands in only a day or two if we need it badly enough. Or, we can spend more time and effort and get stuff cheaper, but those options do seem to be drying up here because the surplus industry has largely died.
So what's it like in the rest of the world? Would you classify your ability to get electronic parts as easy, okay as long as it's something real common, or impossible unless you can strip it out of something you find on the side of the road?