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They have one BIG thing on those places and that is price. Where else you gonna find 16 superbright LEDs for 50c?

If you want LEDs and breadboards might want to order the MGMicro catalog and leave it laying around with "suggestions" circled like we did in the 70s with the Sears Wishbook. I tripped over the place one day looking for some caps and LEDs for an engineer friend of mine and ever since I sent him the link he's been in builder heaven, his little workroom is just filled with breadboards and blinkenlights.

Came to see if someone already mentioned this. A 40x2 line character LCD, an Atmel ATmega8, a PS/2 keyboard and a 5V power supply should be available for about $20 combined. 1KB of RAM should be enough for a scrollback buffer. The problem with this approach is that it'll take a lot of time to make these parts into something useful.

Another option is a cheap Android tablet ($50) or phone and a low cost Bluetooth keyboard ($20).

Well the answer is simple, if you want those chips and would have the skills to actually assemble the thing desoldering it shouldn't be a problem. Oh and for those that do like to DIY, may i make a suggestion? Try BGMicro they have good prices and great service. I have an engineering buddy that does a lot of robotics design work for the local college and he's been going there for years, has nothing but good things to say about them. be sure to sign up for the emails as they have some pretty good email only sales.

Well if you happen to come across a used C128 that isn't assraping priced holler would ya? i got an ex NASA engineer that has some killer code and specs for a robotic arm he built using one of those as the brain but his got stolen at a trade show in Dallas years ago and i told him i'd keep an eye out. I'm "lucky" in that I've gotten to be buddies with the building super who also does a LOT of work for the city and local colleges so he keeps an eye out and is constantly bringing me free loads of off lease desktops and laptops. Sometimes they are missing the hard drives but other than that most of them are intact and easy peasy to refurb, just pulled a 300gb Seagate SATA for my personal pile and replaced my slowly dying Plextor with a brand new LG burner out of the last batch.

Ever since i Frankensteined the best parts of the bunch into a new box for Keith the super, who i swear to god was using a circa 1997 Pentium II 400Mhz as his office box I'm officially on his "cool" list and he goes out of his way to load me up so I'm never at a shortage of parts, got two late model P4s done ready for CL and another i'm just waiting on a drive for. I put him together a nice socket 775 3.06 GHz P4 with HT along with an 80Gb HDD and an old Geforce 7600GS so he could hook it to his widescreen and watch movies with it so he's a seriously happy camper. He's supposed to bring me another big load of laptops and since his GF wants one (and I told him like the desktops i'd slap him together the best of the bunch and hand it over for free) so i'm sure i'll be getting another load of the good stuff, again for a whole $0 and just letting Keith have a good one for his gal. i can't complain as i took the money i made off the last load and built my GF a sweeeet AMD quad, i was upgrading my quad to a Thuban 6 core anyway so i used my old quad and a new board and case to make her a truly beautiful win 7 HP box, 4gb of RAM, 600Gb HDD, 16x DVD burner like new i got out of the last load along with one of those 24 in 1 card readers that replace the floppy slot, and had enough cash left over to get her a wireless keyboard and mouse, new stereo speakers, and a webcam.

As for weird ICs i'll have to ask my NASA engineer bud, he has a ton of ICs in his workshop. he builds bots and rocket for the local college to compete in NASA contests, way cool. have you tried BGMicro yet? if they don't have it you can shoot them an email and if they come across they'll shoot you a heads up. my engineer bud buys a ton of TTL chips and all kinds of ICs from them, great company with cheap prices. if you like to do your own protoboarding and stuff like that check out their specials like the "big bag o' chips" as my bud has bought several of those and come out with some seriously rare and expensive ICs and chips out of those. Basically anything they don't have enough of to offer in their catalog they'll throw with a bunch of other stuff in a big bag and sell cheap. last one he picked up had a ton of sweet TI chips that were just perfect for stepper motor controllers along with some excellent timing circuits and he got the whole bag for like $8 with shipping. Their LEDs are also dirt cheap and kick ass, REALLY bright. they even sell bundles harvested from state street signs and MAN are those suckers bright!

But get to know you're local mom & pops because ya never know when we'll have that weird part. When RDRAM was cutting edge I was the head guy at Doug's PC Service plus and we had a slot in our RAM bin just filled with RDRAM, it turned out one of the shops in the next town had an owner that was cranking out sat descramblers and fake copies of Windows so good they even had the hologram (I found this out when i had stopped in the shop to ask the kid running the place if he had any whitebox cases as i had a rush order and the next thing i know the FBI in full BA kicks in the door and i'm staring at an M16, not fun!) and when the guy evaded capture (and it turned out had sold all the local cops PCs, ha ha!) the cops s

Oh I agree completely for an extremely specialized application they are great, but you're not gonna try to run an OS in that instance on them are you?

I have a customer, hell of a nice guy and a retired NASA engineer (he made most of the full scale mockups for the shuttle. getting to hold some of the actual shuttle blueprints? VERY cool) that keeps boxes full of TTL chips along with all his old 8 bit chip bibles specifially for running stepper motors for robotics. he helps out the local college with designs on robots for NASA contests. they've been cooking up one for a new Mars rover competition and it is really slick. i'll probably get to do some of the wireless networking and C&C for it, again VERY cool.

For little weird parts like that I'd suggest a little site i tripped over years ago called BG Micro which is just wonderful for the DIYers out there. you can get really good deals on chips, caps, LEDs, all kinds of stuff. while i don't get to use it that often my engineer friend practically lives on that site and says their service and support are really top notch.

so for the DIYers out there I highly recommend. he is constantly buying caps by the bag and chips by the tube from there and says for prototyping and breadboarding new designs you really can't beat their stuff. i remember the first time i showed him that site, he must have bought over $100 just in odds and ends, you'd have thought he was a kid in a candy store.

If you are looking for LEDs and tons of little parts for projects cheap may I suggest BGMicro? I have a customer that helps the local college robotic and rocketry clubs and has been buying from them for ages and swears by them. You can get everything from solar panels to IR illumination and all the LEDs in every color they make, all cheap and delivered to your door. Great for the DIY project hacker type.

http://www.bgmicro.com/RESKRESE3.aspx Not a super price (480 @ 1.5c/ea) or assortment. But happened to see it yesterday.

I highly recommend BG Micro for finding parts www.bgmicro.com.

Their site is a little ghetto looking, but it's cheap and they've always had what I need for electronics tinkering.

My point here is that LEDs, unfortunately, are not a replacement for general-purpose lighting until they can make them MUCH brighter. Efficiency is a noble thing, but I refuse to live in a dark cave of a house. May as well not have lights at all.

I can't imagine why this is. Perhaps they are underdriving the lights to the point that they are inefficient, in order to save power? Or maybe it's that they're using too many white LEDs instead of a mixture of other colors plus white LEDs for coverage? LEDs are far, far more efficient than incandescents. Let's see if I can do some basic math today... Sometimes I fail :D A surplus high brightness white LED uses 20mA @ 3.6V (72mW) puts out 9300 mCD (or 9.3 CD.) If I did the math right here that's 129.16666 (etc) CD/W. And of course 1 candela = 1 lumens. This is on the order of ten times the efficiency given for, say, the LED spotlight. Even given 10% inefficiency for the power supply (which, I hope, is vastly higher than the actual inefficiency) something doesn't add up here.

I hope I didn't blow some very simple math, I find I'm dyslexic with numbers or something. Still, P=VI and all that. P=3.6*0.020. P=0.072 (watts.) 9300 mCD = 9.3 CD. 9.3/0.072 = 129.16666(etc) lumens/watt. Yes?

There's been plenty of naming and shaming in this story so far. How about mentioning a few outfits that aren't wasteful? I'd like to direct some positive attention towards companies that pack appropriately.

As an example, I recently ordered some laptop RAM from OemPCWorld.com. I didn't have good specs on what modules would work, so I ordered 3, planning to return 2. According to their return policy, this is cool.

What arrived in the mail was a letter-size FedEx cardboard envelope. Inside that was my receipt and a half-size USPS cardboard return envelope, post-paid, which I'd added to my order to facilitate the return. Inside that were three tiny antistatic mylar bags, each with an SODIMM in it.

Absolutely perfect. I couldn't have packed it better if I'd tried; there was no wasted space, the 2 layers of cardboard provided more than enough protection against flex, and the whole thing weighed just a few ounces.

Another company that does things right: BG Micro. Recently ordered about $30 worth of stuff from them, some small tools, a few components, nothing huge. They wedged it all into the standard textbook-sized USPS box. The fragile bits were protected in individual boxes within, but most of the durable stuff just got a turn of bubble wrap, if that. It was sensible, and everything was in perfect shape when it arrived.

Another: Minimus. Does it bother you that the average first-aid kit contains about a 3:1 ratio of bandages to antiseptic wipes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I wanted to properly equip my kit, but Ididn't want to buy a box of 1,000 alcohol or iodine wipes. Thanks to Minimus, I didn't have to. They carry everything from ketchup and mustard packets, to single-use bug repellent towelettes, all sorts of medical supplies, laundry soap, hand sanitizer, even coffee and tea. I can't say enough good things about this company. I stocked up the entire family's first-aid kits, equipped my travel bag with some laptop screen wipes, and tried a new brand of toothpaste. The whole mess came in a 5x5x4-inch box, and that still left about half the box as air space. Single-use products are the epitome of excessive packaging, but I ordered for convenience. Besides, Burn-Jel isn't something I need a gallon of.

I'm not affiliated in any way with any of the above companies, just a satisfied customer. How about your experiences?

these guys had them last time I looked in their print catalog.

http://www.bgmicro.com/

The only thing you need is a regular DV camera, knock out the IR filter, and get a new filter that lets in IR light in the spectrum of 3-8 m. I'm 99% sure that 3-8 m only lets in the IR light emitted from heat.

Not sure if you'll be able to do this for a very low price though.

BGMicro has a nice IR LED array with 36 IR LED's on a 2 inch PCB for $19.95. In their catalogue on page 5ish. This would be ideal for usage with a home made set of night vision goggles, along with a digital camera.

http://www.bgmicro.com/

This site doesn't have the greatest selection, but if you keep your eyes on it there are some really sweet deals at time.

I always love BG Micro's weird catalog. Don't let the yellow background throw you, it's a mimic of the colored paper they print the dead-tree version on. It's significantly less annoying in that form. Don't count on them for production quantities unless they say so, but some of the small lots of surplus stuff are super cool.

American Science and Surplus, formerly known as Jerryco carries a broader spectrum of stuff, including plastic replicas of human organs, glow-in-the-dark everything, millitary surplus and yes, a variety of electrical and electronic weirdness. If the Edmund Scientific catalog is too highbrow for you, Jerryco is sure to amuse.

There are some hardware hackers over at Green Bay Professional Packet Radio whose projects you might enjoy.

I'm also going to suggest del.icio.us as a good way to collectively manage bookmarks like these. Just go play with it.

You can get a hell of a lot of IR illumination from BG Micro. They sell a couple of different IR illuminator kits which take some DC voltage in to power a grid of IR LEDs. they are sold as a board, complete kit, or finished product for assorted prices. The big IR illuminator kit (soldering req'd) is P/N LED1069 and runs $25.95. 600mA at 13.2VDC (approx.) I have a camera with no IR filter, so all I need is one of these, a nice battery, and an appropriate DC-DC power supply to provide the best voltage. They say it'll run on 12V but 13.2 is where it's most efficient.

B.G. Micro is sort of like All Electronics in that they carry a ton of surplus electronic junk, download both catalogs and enjoy! Also try American Science and Surplus for a wider variety of tech stuff, toys, labware, and millitary goods.

I've been using for a while now. When a site pulls a coupon code or something, Ben usually updates the listing, and the discussions following each posting are a helpful way to share results. "I had to put in a California ZIP code to view the item, but then I was able to order it shipped to my Michigan address." or "Make sure the CompUSA is within 4 miles of the Best Buy or they won't honor the pricematch. Get a friendly CSR and you should be golden!"

I've stopped using Pricewatch, their listings have become crammed with keyword spam and are all but useless. The "price including shipping" column was a good idea, but the quality of the listings has been terrible lately.

How about a developer nano-ITX board?

Or, for those of you who don't have root access at VIA, how about a biometric flash drive? A decent smartphone? How about a working LCD display, with all the wiring pre-done please.

Another mistake Microsoft made was abandoning support for anything other than x86 architecture, making Linux the natural choice for ARM. MIPs, power PC... basically for all the processors that aren't as power-hungry as the x86.

This is very much like the post I would have liked to have written. While I was reading it though, I started to think about the future, which is kind of fun because you can make shit up. One thing I didn't make up though is that a friend of mine once told me that people would run Unix on their microwaves (they did not say what kind, I think it was cute that they said Unix) because it's all you'll be able to get. It must have been Charlie. Okay so that sounds like horseshit, but there are devices that were pretty neat but fell off the market due to lack of demand that no one is making any more, I recall some voice synthesis chip that had a phoeneme lookup table and you could record your own samples, stick them in a prom, and you could make a speech synthesizer sound like you, or anyone else for that matter, and it went away. (It might be back by now.)

So think about all the crazy shit we can do now, how fine our processes are in general. Only the best fabs can do the really tiny stuff but everyone's processes are getting smaller, so you can make chips cheaper. The packaging is getting cheaper all the time too, though it's already pretty damn cheap. I mean think about how inexpensive assorted little chips are today. Whip out your good old BG Micro catalog and you can get assorted basic ICs for fifty cents, stuff that I personally have paid five bucks for. An XPORT with a 186 chip in it is $50, and that's a whole frickin computer. I mean if you had that and a terminal, you could get a few simple network apps on it. Actually, that sounds like a really fun project, now if only I could afford an XPORT :P

So how long is it going to be before consumers are paying ten bucks for some little microcomputer that comes with Linux on it and is smaller than the battery you attach it to? It can't be THAT long. And in quantity they'll be maybe five. Really you can do the job of controlling a microwave with a really nice interface with a pic today, but they keep promising us dirt-cheap oled displays so I'd assume people are going to want to have touch-sensitive video interfaces in even low-end appliances within a few years. Okay, maybe more than a few, but you know it's coming...

Anyway, people are making really low power x86 processors now, so the fact that people are still teaching programming them in assembler in schools since x86-based systems are inexpensive and readily available (most everyone has one already, so you kind of have to teach it for now) means that we likely WILL see embedded NT make a comeback. It will become more useful as the hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper. Old designs that people are interested in using don't go away; some magic research and bing! here they come again. You have to wonder what chips you've seen recently that somewhere inside of them contain an Am386 or something similar. Old cores never die, they just get chopped up into bits.

What, you didn't read your copy of the B.G.Micro catalog when it came in the mail?

Page 19,center lefthand: Sony PCM audio - Converts audio to PCM, and back again!

BNCs for audio, DB9(RS-232 serial) and DB15(???) for digital output. $15.95/ea.

Well, I'd suggest that they don't communicate with satellites at all. Other than receiving GPS signals, that is.

Look at it this way: at BG Micro you can now buy a GPS module, with serial output, for less than $20. A minor microcontroller circuit and a cellphone or cellphone module later, and you have your little tracking device.

The monthly fees are about right for cellphone access, and the large equipment cost certainly leaves enough room for a profit.

I could certainly build such a device, order cellphone service for my customers' areas, and provide a server to phone home to. And I would also have to be paid some way other than by credit card.

By the way, someone was selling a strikingly similar service on eBay, for the same price. There were a bunch of those auctions with all the huge all-caps text and yellow backgrounds, etc.,.

Our friends at BG Micro have a GPS module for $15 ($25 incl antenna)! Now, you might have to solder to a wires to a chip to get serial output, but for 90% off who cares?

Another possibility is using a DeLorme Earthmate laptop-type GPS, you can get them cheap on ebay et al. Alas they use a proprietary (ick) Rockwell protocol, but it also spits out some NMEA.

Stay away from the Windows/Wine DeLorme software: it sucks hard. The best software I've found, hands down is ... MS MapPoint or StreetMap. Beautiful accurate maps, hi resolution, good features, etc; around $20 at Sam's Club or other larger outlets.

just a coupla points for you geeks to pontificate on,

- john

1. Roofmounted Trimble SVeeSix-CM3 GPS receiver with microsecond-accurate pulse-per-second output: $24.95.
2. Network Time Protocol synchronization software: Free

I'm pretty surprised chrisd didn't post this:
http://www.pheatonforums.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php? t=137&postdays=0&postorder=&start=0

And the final pictures here:
http://www.planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Final/angleshot1 . PG
http://www.planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Final/angleshot2 . PG
http://www.planetcasemod.com/NeXT/Final/angleshot3 . PG

This is quite possibly the most impressive case mod I have ever seen.

You can buy one of those displays at B.G. Micro, in case you're wondering.

I'm impressed. I just spent the week modding my system to be silent. I replaced my fans with Panaflows, and run the three case fans at 5 volts, put an 80mm on the processor and replaced the PS fan with a panaflow. Everything stays cool and now all I hear is the drives spinning.

By the way you can get good fans cheap.. here BGmicro

And get yourself the books "Getting Started In Electronics" and ALL of the little "Engineer's Handbook" books (recently updated, I noticed) by Forrest Mims. This man has started more people into electronics than I could possibly imagine. I hope he was compensated well by the publisher for his great contribution to electronics - I owe a lot of my start to get where I am now to him.

I CANNOT recommend these books highly enough and I'm suprised nobody else has. Once you get those, you can get on your way with some parts and things, but get them from someplace like DigiKey or Mouser and you'll save a lot of money experimenting. I also recommend surplus places, one in particular: BG Micro, they have lots of stuff to tinker with cheap.

Do you like digital stuff? Then go check out a Java-based TINI from Ibutton or even better, some of the kits that are available from Parallax Inc. They're expensive, but their stuff is quality and works.

Good luck on a rewarding and interesting hobby with almost no bounds!

Try BG Micro. They deal in surplus displays, chips, and electronic components. Their stock is always changing so it is best to check back every few weeks or get on their snail mail flyer list.