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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2d ago (text post)   512 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 13, 2025

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

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I think that sourcing the basics, e.g. a breadboard, wired resistors, capacitors, LEDs, jumper wires, some opamps, is not that hard.

Yeah this part is easy if you know to get the $10 starter kit.

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).

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.

Agreed, market failures abounds. Except in China?

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.)

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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