Olin,

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 19:31:26 -0400, Olin Lathrop wrote:

> Sorry.  I truly had no idea it would be such a hassle for people outside the US.

Not your fault - the differences between the English-Speaking countries goes much further than being "divided
by a common language"!  :-)

> Jameco is actually the preferred vendor for hobby electronics stuff here, and I use them a lot for basic
stuff for the business too.

So I gather - we have "Maplin" (http://www.maplin.co.uk) which is a chain of shops and mailorder, and
originally did mainly components.  As the years have passed, they have cut back more and more on components
and added consumer devices and electronic toys, to the point that the latter seems to fill most of their shops
nowadays.  The cutback on components is really annoying, for example the only ZIF socket they do is 32-pin...
anyone know what chip this might be for?  :-#  At one time I would get virtually everything I needed from
them, but nowadays they are way down my list for anything that can wait a few days.  When I urgently need a
430ohm resistor I can drive there, but the number of times something in their catalogue turns out to be
"special order only" in the shops has annoyed me into "dropping" them for normal supplies.

> Maybe I should offer a kit, or a partial kit with the less common items in it?

A partial kit would be a Good Thing.  From my perspective it would contain the PCB, ZIF socket, the DC socket
(it has a pinout I've never seen before!), the RJ12 socket (not vital but not something I keep in stock), and
possibly the transistors.  The latter depends on whether substitutions would be OK - we discussed this earlier
and 3904/6 seemed to be acceptable.  Others may want the OpAmp (I happened to have a couple) and for those for
whom this is their first programmer that vital part: the programmed PIC!  I'd say a target price of less than
$30 so that it gets under the VAT horizon, and I think the above does that.

Not that I'll need another one, of course - and anyway I need to stop bulding programmers as a displacement
activity and start building actual projects!  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body