this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Electronics
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When you buy components, buy a bag of them. Good for when you let the smoke out of one, and you can have several projects on the go at a time.
@RandomUser @Mammothmothman
Problem with doing that is sooner or later you are going to end up with piles of stuff like esp12f's and such. I have more packaging tubes of ATtiny85's than I will ever use.
When I started there was lots of smoke 😀 it's true that you can easily accumulate random stuff, but I still think it's better to have spares of the things I use than risking running out and waiting for a delivery. Maybe I'm just disorganised.
These days I mostly apply it to passives. Especially small ones. 0201 are a pain to work with, liable to blow away if you look at them wrong. 0402s are better, but still easy to lose. But if I'm trying to keep size & weight down I tend to need the tiny parts, so it's easier to design to use common values as much as possible and spend $30-40 for a reel of 10,000 of them. I doubt I'll ever run out of 10kΩ resistors!
A related tip for components with lots of pins, and especially the slightly-expensive ones like microcontrollers: use sockets instead of soldering them to the board directly. That way you're less likely to overheat them with the soldering iron, and also when you do let the magic smoke out of one it's a lot easier to replace.