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from the Which-way-to-Millinocket?-(p6V2Ew1M0sE) dept.
Famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has published an electronic edition of his Essential Guide to Shenzhen. The PDF version is now available for download free of charge, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. His book is intended to help non-Mandarin speakers navigate the sprawling electronics markets, Hua Qiang Bei, in Shenzen. It specializes in finding components, setting quantities and packaging, agreeing on payments and deliveries, and remembering the vendor's location within the dense mazes.
It’s taken me a long time to get around to doing this, but here’s a link for a free-to-download copy of “The Essential Guide to Shenzhen”. The catalyst that prompted me to finally get around to this is the fact that Crowd Supply is now sold out (I think Adafruit is also sold out, too). Since the maps in the guide are now quite out of date, I figure it’s not worth re-printing the guide. Instead, it may be more useful to publish a link, so that others can swap out the map pages with something more up-to-date and have a swing at making their own derivative works.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 17 2019, @06:44PM (11 children)
Is that I'm live in a lesser "tech center" of the US, and there's not a goddamn store you can buy a breadboard and jumper cables and resisters and power supplies and other incredibly basic electrical components for 200 mile radius of my home. I could get a raspberry pi in the education section of an electronic store, but literally nothing to hook it's GPIO pins to.
There's plenty of businesses that deal in experimental electronics around, but it seems the only definition of DIY that has any sway here is home improvement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @06:51PM (2 children)
Micro Center. It has everything. Move near a Micro Center.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 17 2019, @08:41PM
Why?
Just to have microburgers and have the satisfaction to answer 'yes' to 'Do you want microchips with that?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:59PM
By the time I had bought all the breadbords, jumper wires, assorted resistor and capacitor packs, a few displays, power supplies, etc from Amazon, at good prices . . .
THEN MicroCenter decides to start stocking some of these parts, at top dollar prices.
I did buy a few more odds and ends there, just because I could have it in my hand that day.
I suppose if there are local area classes being taught that require students to get some of these items, it would make sense for MicroCenter to now be
stalkingstocking them.The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @06:54PM (2 children)
US does not manufacture electronics hardware since the 1990s.
So, you are right. Mail order like Mouser or Digikey is your only hope.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday December 17 2019, @08:04PM (1 child)
If you have a Fry's there's some hope there, although some shelves in the electronics hobbyist section are bare with neglect. You can get cables, crimp stuff, solder stuff, they have a lot of discrete components and switches, Arduino shields and Raspberry Pi stuff, wire spools, etc. You're gonna pay a markup, sometimes a really obscene markup, for the convenience (I recall a harness used to install a 2.5" drive into a tower PC being 40 bucks! Of course I didn't fucking buy it).
If you're not in California it's gonna be a bitch to find one, though, but I think in this case ordering from Fry's is a more appropriate situation than Mouser or Digikey. Mouser and Digikey are more suited to bulk items and industrial accounts and the shit you buy from those may be higher quality but you're gonna pay the same, if not more than, buying from Fry's with the markup. And then when your expensive DC brushless fan arrives and you discover at the last minute that the PWM you're using for it can't even get it moving past starting torque, you will have to return it with all the hassle and wait that entails. There is nothing fucking worse than being a tinkering hobbyist and having to wait to get even basic-bitch parts, especially if you're using a trial-and-error process.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 18 2019, @11:04PM
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:10PM (2 children)
You've never heard of Newegg?
https://www.newegg.com/ [newegg.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:27PM (1 child)
1. Newegg sucks for hobby electronics. They're great if you want consumer electronics, but if you're trying to build something new and unique, good luck. They have a few listings for e.g. breadboards, but they're listed under "gadgets and wearables" because they don't give a fuck about the entire category.
2. There's an advantage to not having to either pay a $20 delivery fee or wait a week to progress on a project.
3. There's something more fundamental about a society that so devalues inventive hobbies as to make them utterly and completely absent from day-to-day life, that has nothing to do with my personal access.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday December 17 2019, @10:41PM
4. A lot of "hobbyist" shit on Newegg ships from China and it is not only crap, but takes a month to arrive.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday December 18 2019, @12:56AM
It's not just the US, electronics retailers in many countries have gone from selling electronic components to selling cheap Chinese-made crap, because there's more money in it. Mind you others have often sprung up to replace them once the rot has set in, e.g (if you're in that part of the world) Dick Smith -> Jaycar/Altronics, both of which still do a ~500-page printed catalogue of pure electronic porn because that's how it should be.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday December 18 2019, @06:14PM
Mouser or DigiKey. Or Amazon.
It's what I do, anyway.
This sig for rent.