----- Original Message ----- From: "William Chops Westfield" To: Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 9:35 PM Subject: Re: [OT:] RadioShack Canada S***s > It depends on how seriously you're going to pursue your hobby. Stuff > from surplus stores GOES AWAY and you might never be able to get it > again. No, you don't need 10 of everything. But it's pretty silly to > order ONLY one of a $2 part, too. It does often make sense to get more than you need, but the post I was replying to said 10 times as much of everything. So yes, when I do order that $1.25 cable from All Electronics, I will be ordering a few (but not 10), and it would be stupid to order more than 1 of the $5 phone keypads; I'm still looking for a cheaper online source; Active Annex in Toronto sells them (or did a few years ago) for 35 cents. You really need to think about what you're buying and decide how many you expect to use over the next year. > Save your money for however long it takes and order $100 worth of parts > at a time. I don't find it very difficult to get most orders up to > $100... :-) My whole point here is that simply doesn't work for the hobbiest. If you're building someone else's design there's no problem, but if you're doing your own design, you always forget something or something doesn't work out and needs to be changed. I will need some sort of buzzer for my timer project. Do I order 1 of each that All Electrtonics carries and hope one has a sound I like? I can just buy a Piezo and see if a square wave output from the pic directly driving the piezo will sound good. If it does, that's probably something I should buy 10 of, but I just don't know. Part of being a hobbiest is that I can experiment but a lack of easy access to parts with no shipping cost really puts a damper on things. > (OTOH, learn when it's ok to substitute resistor values. For the > average digital experimentor, you can probably get away with 100, 1000, > 1k, 10k, and 100k resistors. Period.) Good start, but you'll need several more values in the 100-300 ohm range to limit current to LEDs. Assuming 5V supply and 1.7V dropped across the LED, that's 33mA at 100 ohms or 3.3mA at 1k. Neither is suitable. If you're working on your project and decide you want to put a couple of LEDs in series you'll need another lower value. You might end up using a different voltage, especially since the PIC can work at lower voltages. See how easy it is to miss out on a part while ordering? Once you figure out which values you would have forgotten by just getting the powers of 10, you can place another order right away and eat the $6 shipping cost or put your project on hold until you come up with another $100 order. Neither option is very appealing for a hobbiest. Jason -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics