This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think that sourcing the basics, e.g. a breadboard, wired resistors, capacitors, LEDs, jumper wires, some opamps, is not that hard.
Amazon or (in Germany) Conrad have you covered there (if you don't mind overpaying compared to what the parts would cost in bulk).
If you increase your budget to 200$, then different people will want very different things. Matrix LCDs, TTL logic chips, myriads of sensors, servos. Some will want passive SMD components (with different preferences to size).
And in that stage, they probably also want components which are not sold by Conrad, which is when things get painful.
There are, of course, companies which carry zillons of electronic components, e.g. Farnell, Mouser, RS, Digikey. Their stock is well curated, you can filter based on dozens of criteria until you end up with what fits your needs. In fact, having used these websites I have come to despise the shopping experience on Amazon, where little in the way of curation happens and accessories for X regularly appear in the category X.
Alas, these electronics vendors do not typically sell to hobbyists. Presumably, cutting five chips from a reel and packing them for sale is not in itself very profitable, but simply a prerequisite to sell a reel of your chips to companies, eventually. Unlike corporations, private persons rarely scale up their projects to a scale where serious money gets spent, and complying with the consumer protection regulations is just not worth it.
So you sometimes find yourself in the situation where you know that four different companies carry the chip you want, but none of them want to sell to you. (These days, it might be possible that you can get it from China, if you don't mind the wait, though.)
Yeah this part is easy if you know to get the $10 starter kit.
Agreed, market failures abounds. Except in China?
I have 3 different shipments on the way from Ali Express, with 3 different orders in each one, each order for $2-3 containing just 3-5 chips cut from a reel or whatever. And the average price of each shipment is about $11 (>$10 is the free shipping level). The combination of cheap labor and postal arbitrage (China gets some preferential extremely ludicrously cheap shipping to the US, cheaper than US-US domestic) is unreal. It's almost outrageous enough that I sympathize with Trump. It does take 10-12 days to arrive though.
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Many of them do (likely because they realize that "hobbyist" might be in a position to decide where to order parts for a company in a year or two). They just have somewhat higher mailing costs which get waived if you order enough euros worth of parts at once. My hobby projects with a friend have made them more than a thousand euros worth of business by now once we expanded to making diy kits of some projects and needed multiple prototype rounds.
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