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#digikey

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Yes, you take your chances - there's the occasional outright scam, or so-so quality parts (like the ones that inspired me to write this), but you go into it with your eyes open. You take a chance because it's dirt cheap.

And 90% of the time, the parts are just fine.

For anything important, or safety-related, or mains-connected, or anything I build for other than personal use, I won't use yum-cha parts like this. For those, I order good name-brand parts from a reputable supplier (Newark/Element14/RS, DigiKey, etc).

But for hobbyists just having fun, messing around? AliExpress and friends are an absolute godsend. You can now get into hobby electronics for practically nothing, and build stuff and see if you like it.

There's a place for quality parts, and a place for cheap parts. Knowing which is which isn't hard.

Three cheers for cheap components!

2/2

#DigiKey has lost me as a customer today. I've ordered twice and both times, I paid in front with a realtime bank transaction. And both times I had to contact the customer support twice. At least. And it took over a week between them receiving the money and them acknowledging that they've received the money. And there were 1.5 months between these orders. This can't be as I cannot trust Digikey anymore which is really unfortunate. Let's see what they'll do with my second order.

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@cd0 Wow. What a horrible approach of #Digikey. If I have a #proxy, does that solve the problem ? Can I then leave all their tracker crap on and not care less? Or do I need a "quarantined" web session that I then toast? Or use #tails ? Or have I not understood? Why is this so hard? It is like when u go to a shop for cheese they say "No cheese unless you tell me the contents of your fridge and pantry". #adblockers #trackers

Yesterday was bad freaking ass. I've started mentoring my kids' high school robotics team. (while wearing an N95) Last year, they invited my then-8th grader to be a full-fledged team member, so since she's a freshman and now I have two kids on the team, I thought I should offer up my time. Plus, my oldest is the team captain. Yesterday was the first meeting with the veterans and the kids who want to join this season. I love quirky high school nerds! They are sweet and kind. They're curious and excited. And that was just watching the slide deck full of typos and mistakes. And kids who made the slides with mistakes laughed at themselves, making the whole room laugh. I defy you to hold a straight face with 50 neurospicy laughing teenagers. It was a delightful afternoon. I know less than nothing about robots, so it will be an interesting school year. But sometimes, it's good for kids to see adults learning and making mistakes alongside them. So that'll be my job, I think. That, and ensuring everyone is fed, gets on the plane, and is in their assigned hotel room at lights out. ;) Today, we are building XRP bots to eventually play full-contact soccer (football) as practice for building our big FRC bot in January. Wish me luck!

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@dmaonR Can be a challenge. I've built up a pretty good stock of parts over the decades to get me through most prototyping situations, but the final productizing of course you want specifically purchased parts.

#Digikey is pretty great at the rapid delivery tho – ordering in the afternoon and in my hands before lunch the next day.