On 2/18/07, Jinx wrote: > > farnell appear to have a branch in your country > Radiospares too http://www.rsonline.se [...] > http://www.arrowne.com/arrow_worldwide/sweden/main.html Thanks for finding the companies. Unfortunately, all of the three above listed requires you to be a company in order to buy items from them. As a hobbyist not running a company, I cannot purchase anything from them. This is usually the standard behaviour for all electronic components retailers here in Sweden, except for Elfa (their overpricings do however make you really depressed). I see a lot of web stores in the US that's got fair pricings and gazillions of components, but they usually don't ship abroad and if they should do this, the shipping costs is around 300% of the actual order value. And this is why it sucks to be an EE-student (or mechatronics, like me) in Sweden who is in need for components/tools; there are no fair priced providers. Anyway. I found another PIC-programmer on ebay: . I guess this one is also a pirated version (due to the fact that it's shipped from China), but since the seller has got 15000+ feedback, it cannot be entirely crappish. I was about to buy it, but then Bob Blick's post arrived to the list, making me hesitate yet once more whether i really *should* go PIC or Atmel, which is the reason that has stopped me earlier from beginning with microcontrollers. But instead of bailing out completely, I kept the sanity; so what if PIC sucks and Atmel rocks, this will be something I will find out on my own when I get more experienced. And this choice is really not like painting yourself into a corner (except for the cost of tools), just because I might chose PIC at this time - I must start SOMEWHERE! - there is nothing saying I cannot chose AVR later on. Plus, Wouter's pages and JAL looks pretty user friendly for my level. So, I'll go for PIC this time. Can you say anything about that chinese programmer in the URL above? I mean compared to the other one I listed earlier (http://tinyurl.com/2d2m4t). It's 3 o'clock in the morning here. It's usually a problem for me, because when I get a new design for a project like the one I'm having now, I'm having a hard time getting tired until all details are done for the day. The details for today were to make a draft for the block-diagram and to peek some more into microcontrollers. The draft got done 6 hours ago, and thanks to Wouter's PIC-pages, I think I can finally rest my case (regarding which branch I will chose as a start) for today. -- - Rikard. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist