9 ms·

This affects temperature sensors/parts bought from un-official distributors like ebay or AliExpress, not digikey, farnel, etc. Perhaps I've been too lucky in my

by as-j 6y ago

This affects temperature sensors/parts bought from un-official distributors like ebay or AliExpress, not digikey, farnel, etc. Perhaps I've been too lucky in my career and practiced EE for work, but who would you ever go to ebay instead of digikey?? <mind blown> Digikey certainly has a premium, but their speciality is small numbers/cut tape/etc and they have a small order size which makes them ok for hobby work, and I've used them for small production runs when I didn't want to end up with a ton of excess materials. Makes you wonder what other junk is out there, and what purchasing guy figured he'd save $10 and get it from ebay...?

exmadscientist 6y ago
Another professional EE here. I never expect random chips bought off AliExpress/eBay/Amazon/etc to work, much less be genuine. I do expect breakout modules and the like to work, though I don't expect them to contain genuine parts. (That implies I'd never source from these places when it's a critical function.) I'm always surprised when people expect grey-market crud to perform just as well as top-dollar stuff....
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  I've bought hundreds of electronic parts on eBay and rarely had issues. I discovered LED strips were a thing by shopping on eBay, years ago, much before they were trendy, I was buying them at one fifth the cost American retailers were charging. Bought Arduino clones for a quarter the price of the "real" thing when I was a broke student. ATMega MCUs for a dollar a piece, free shipping. They worked perfectly fine. Could not have afforded them without eBay. I'm Canadian, and last I checked, the shipping costs to get parts from places like digikey was just ridiculous.
  - exmadscientist 6y ago
    I didn't say they don't work, just that I don't expect them to work. The prices are such that you can, and should, buy three items from three different vendors and cross your fingers that one works. In professional engineering, where time is money, Digi-Key or Mouser is always more efficient, if they've got what you need. For personal stuff, where the value of your time is ~zero, the opposite can be true.
  - Baeocystin 6y ago
    99%+ of my hobbyist electronics bits n' bobs are ali express/banggood specials, and they have all worked fine, from arduino clones to sensors and ESP8266's. If I were working on something more important that dinking around for fun, sure, I might care a bit more about what's actually on the board. But as it is, the clones are more than adequate for my needs, particularly at their price point.
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      In the case of the ESP8266, the parts were available through channels like eBay and AliExpress long before they showed up through any of the typical electronics distributors. Same thing goes for other first-in-China parts like the GD32 series (STM32 clone) and WCH340 series (USB/serial).
- ckocagil 6y ago
  I do electronics as a hobby. I sometimes buy chips from very dubious shops in China for fun. Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Then I decap the chip by boiling the package in acid and inspect the die under a microscope. More than half of them are genuine. I get some nice surprises because even the chips that I expect to be absolutely fake can turn out to be genuine. So far I've seen a ton of fake audio op-amps. For discrete parts like transistors things are much simpler. Just build a simple test rig and test a few parameters. If they fall within the specs they're probably good enough. Of course it's not worth it to do this for jellybeans like 2N3904, but when some parts get obsoleted without a replacement (or they're too pricey) there isn't much else a lone hobbyist can do.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Links? That sounds fun...
  - boznz 6y ago
    they also may be refurbished ie unsoldered off a board. that happened to me a few years back for a bunch of soic op-amps I was having difficulty sourcing.. they worked ok though.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Not so with power transistors, you don't need a microscope to see that the dies found in off-brand power transistors are suspiciously small compared to equivalents from proper manufacturers.
jerkstate 6y ago
I’m sure these things have made it into a lot of those Arduino beginner kits and stuff like that. It really makes me mad because the various incompatibilities with the datasheet might frustrate a beginner or mislead them to think they are doing something wrong.
myself248 6y ago
I'd never expect to find these in official products from trusted brands, but off-brand crap? Oh yeah. DIY kits? Absolutely. The parts drawer at the makerspace? One hundred percent. So much stuff on eBay is free shipping, that's huge when you only need a few dollars worth of stuff. If I could convince Digi-Key to lick a 55-cent stamp when I need ten of something, instead of charging me $7 for shipping, I'd have a lot fewer counterfeit parts around.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  There will be no licking of 55 cent stamps. US stamps have been 100% self-adhesive since 2016ish. The envelope is of course another matter.
  - sfgweilr4f 6y ago
    Not to mention the obvious, but that glue isn't necessarily that great* for you either. * allegedly of course.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Is this a Seinfeld reference, or something else I’m not understanding correctly? :)
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      the old fashioned glue is gum arabic... gum arabic sees more uses these days in food than outside it
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  This. I buy a decent amount of hobby electronics from eBay and AliExpress because yes it is cheaper. When I need quality, Mouser, DigiKey, and McMaster-Carr are there for me. But the minimum $7-9 shipping is the main reason is forego them. I’d gladly pay 2x for small electronic components (vs directly from China options) if shipping wasn’t a problem.
godelski 6y ago
Lots of hobbiests will buy things off ebay, Amazon, or Alibaba. It is extremely common and if you go into forums it is even encouraged. I'm not saying you should go to those places, but that lots of people do.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  We've spoiled ourselves with CCP subsidy. It wasn't like that about 20 years ago. You'd pay a pretty penny for things and support local/national businesses. Now, you're funneling fuel into the dragon's mouth. For what? A hobby project? Just spend the $7 shipping and get it from Digikey.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Shipping fee is not supported by CCP subsidy but by Universal Postal Convention.
  - julianz 6y ago
    Just went to my local Digikey site. Shipping is $20 USD or $26 NZD.
    - fermienrico 6y ago
      I presume you’re in NZ: You also live in the Southern Hemisphere, way south. YMMV. I presume ordering literally anything besides AliExpress/eBay us expensive in New Zealand.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Shipping cost is the biggest downer for a hobbyist just wanting a couple chips from Digikey or Mouser.
flingo 6y ago
I've often bought parts from aliexpress because they're available for <$2 with shipping, and can be somewhat vetted easily with an example arduino sketch that comes with the library. (IMO, the goal in designing a board for your problem is getting someone to clone it and sell it for cheaper than you could hope to build it. Ideally, better too) Sparkfun and adafruit deserve commendation here, as their designs are open enough to even have low effort clones work reasonably well. (I'd buy a legit version if I was doing something professional, but prototyping for the sake of research is a different story) I'm a special case though, since deliveries from the local AVNET subsidiary to my employer are often comped due to volume/location.
mindslight 6y ago
How else can you get anything from Maxim besides samples? (joke may be a decade out of date)
- metaphor 6y ago
  I understood that joke to mean, "Maxim components are so expensive that the grey market is about the only place the layman can afford them in more than 1-off prototype quantities." At least that was my experience 8 or so years ago when I made the mistake of purchasing a lot of 100 MAX7219 off eBay for $100 shipped from China...$1/ea was such a tempting deal to a younger, more naive self when these chips were selling for upwards of $7/ea from ECIA-authorized distributors at the time. Never fell for that trap again.
  - pravda 6y ago
    >I made the mistake of purchasing a lot of 100 MAX7219 off eBay Why was it a mistake? I've used the 'fake' ones. Did not have any problem with them.
    - metaphor 6y ago
      The fundamental problem with counterfeits is that they aren't held to any published spec, so comparing your experience to mine isn't really meaningful...other than being not genuine, you can't generalize anything about counterfeits. It was so long ago, I had to dig up notes. On the performance side, the counterfeits I received couldn't be clocked anywhere near the 10 MHz limit specified by a genuine MAX7219; one package pin that should be tied to GND was floating internally (contributing to poor thermal performance); but the real showstopper was that intensity control didn't work for shit. My records reflect nigelectronics on eBay as the counterfeit seller. This is the address I was instructed to return the counterfeits to when I called them out on it for a refund (I eventually got the refund, but threw these counterfeits in the trash where they belong): Cheng Kwok Hang 15F, BLK 1, Aldrich Garden, 2 Oi Lai Street, Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong On the business side, I effectively wasted 10 days lead time in a tight pipeline just waiting for this garbage to arrive + more time/frustration isolating why the chips were failing initial tests; swallowed ~$700 out of pocket + expedited shipping for a single BOM line item to purchase genuine replacements from an authorized distributor; and looked like a complete hobbyist amateur to a collaborator in NYC (who was working on the mechanical side) as I had to explain why my stupid decisions meant he'll have to wait another 2 weeks before receiving the pre-production prototypes I had promised (which meant his clients ultimately had to bear that burden). Then there was all the manual rework which I didn't even keep track of. This was my first semi-pro side gig out of college, and juggling all the unexpected curve balls with a fulltime day job was quite stressful.
jeffbee 6y ago
It does seem like the headline is misleading, as surely the unit-weighted average authenticity of these parts leans towards 1.0. Surely nobody would buy these by the 1000's from unofficial channels?
bigiain 6y ago
You might not buy em from eBay/Alibaba - but the guy your contract manufacturer goes to might end up getting them from the same source as the eBay/Alibaba vendors do - either knowingly or unwittingly. We ended up with 3 spools of counterfeit WS2812Bs that had cheapskated out on some data line capacitors on the die. Totally fucked the emitted RF noise levels compared to the same thing build with genuine ones, and intermittently flaked out when trying to run high speed data updates long-ish distance - the lights 6-7m and 40-50 leds from the controller weren't reliable... Manufacturer and their supplier were very good at fixing things for us once the problem was discovered and attributed to bad components, but it was a very stressful lead to the xmas supply chain back then. (Then the entire company fell apart for different reasons, but the stress and expense of that incident was quite likely a strong contributor to those the triggering of those company-ending reasons... :shrug:)
- as-j 6y ago
  Yeah, that's what scares me. On the other hand...I do have to trust my CM for so much already. Trust is an interesting thing in business.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
I live outside the US. Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS will gladly sell me 4000 of those capacitors. For a hobbyist outside of the US, AliExpress is often the only realistic source aside from the local RadioShack equivalent which probably doesn't have what you need.
- jbay808 6y ago
  A lot of the time, these struggles are invisible to those living in the US. It's similar with McMaster-Carr; typically an American hobbyist will ask why one would look anywhere else for hardware parts, not knowing that (at least for many years) they would only ship to corporate partners for orders outside the US.
  - robk 6y ago
    This is the situation https://raptorsupplies.com https://raptorsupplies.com specializes in, Getting high quality parts at relatively small order sizes shipped easily overseas at reasonable prices
    - xxs 6y ago
      I am not sure what you suggest - I tried finding something random and trivial: a decent 100uf, 400v capacitor (needed for a switching power supply primary) - zero. z0107 (low powered triac, 600v, 0.8A) - nothing. bt134 (another popular triac) - nothing. BQ24735 (Battery charger control chip) - nothing. 2n7002 (N-ch mosfet)... I can safely say the site is not usable for electronics. It returned valves, pipes,nuts - pretty much useless for anything in Europe, being non-metric.
      - ZeikJT 6y ago
        I think they were talking about the McMaster-Carr situation, since that is what they generally supply.
whatusername 6y ago
So I ordered a ds18b20 sensor last year from ebay. paid AUD $1.88 for it (including shipping). Digikey looks to be $7 plus $20 shipping (and I'm not certain if those are USD or AUD) As someone who doesn't do this for work - I've never seen/heard of digikey or farnel before. Maybe if I was ordering enough to hit the $60 free shipping limit - but I don't think I've spent that on electrical bits in the last year.
- joshvm 6y ago
  In Oz, you could try Element14 (which is Farnell rebranded). $50 for free shipping, or $15 under. The DS18B20's are about $7 on there too, so that's the correct AUD price. Also check out RS Components Australia. They often offer free shipping with no minimums. https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/temperature-sensors-humidity-sensors/5402849/ https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/temperature-sensors-humidity-... RS is also a good place to buy decent mechanical bits and pieces (bearings, drill bits, etc) if you don't want to play the lottery on Amazon. They even do their own 3D printing filament which I've had some good results with. If you need small quantities (like one-of), you should look at sample requests. This is still alive and well - almost all the big manufacturers still honour them. I've gotten some $40 RTD digitising chips from Analog, micro-coax cables from Samtec and lots of random bits over the years. You may need a non-generic email address, but that's easy to sort. For example you can sample the DS18B20 straight from Maxim: https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/sensors/DS18B20.html/tb_tab3 https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/sensors/DS18B20....
omgtehlion 6y ago
I live in Russia. Some time ago it was possible to buy from these distributors (and pay additional $20 - $50 for shipping). Nowadays they ship only to companies, not domestic addresses, so it is not only cost-prohibitive for cheap orders, but outright impossible for a hobbyist or individual person.
ChrisRR 6y ago
This affects many suppliers where they see a cheaper source for their component and go for it. You may be subject to it if you send your designs and BOMs to a PCB house who also source and populate the components, then you're at the mercy of their procurement process
magicalhippo 6y ago
> who would you ever go to ebay instead of digikey In addition to the shipping price for DigiKey which means batching up stuff is essential, one reason I buy stuff on AliExpress is that there are tons of ready-made breakout modules for easier prototyping. Adafruit and SpakFun do make some, but there are quite a lot of interesting modules you cannot get from those sources.
janekm 6y ago
The DS18B20 clones are very popularly assembled into a waterproofed probe with a cable and metal cap. It's a very useful item which as far as I know is difficult to obtain from one of the official distributors (and would cost significantly more than the eBay specials).
- joshvm 6y ago
  You can buy those metal sensor sheaths separately. Search for something like "rtd sheath metal" e.g. ebay #162885663706. $2-3 for a set of 5. Then you pot the sensor with something thermally conductive and waterproof - waterproof potting compound is cheap (e.g. "RS PRO White Epoxy Potting Compound"). Finally heatshrink the outside. You will never beat China prices, but this is one of those parts that's relatively easy to make yourself and shouldn't cost a fortune. The most expensive stuff is the epoxy, but it will last for a while. Purely on performance, does it matter? If it doesn't matter if you're off by a degree or two, then the cheap versions will be OK. If you need the guarantee of a genuine sensor, or a different cable length, or whatever, it'll cost about $20 for five.
allo37 6y ago
Hah, first company I worked for involved the development of embedded systems and the boss wasn't shy about buying parts from AliExpress (thankfully most of it was still DigiKey). Some stuff had a significant cost difference: Official Omron rotary encoders vs copies, for example. Of course they usually worked about 70% as well as the real thing.

by as-j 6y ago

exmadscientist 6y ago

Another professional EE here. I never expect random chips bought off AliExpress/eBay/Amazon/etc to work, much less be genuine. I do expect breakout modules and the like to work, though I don't expect them to contain genuine parts. (That implies I'd never source from these places when it's a critical function.) I'm always surprised when people expect grey-market crud to perform just as well as top-dollar stuff....

tachyonbeam 6y ago
I've bought hundreds of electronic parts on eBay and rarely had issues. I discovered LED strips were a thing by shopping on eBay, years ago, much before they were trendy, I was buying them at one fifth the cost American retailers were charging. Bought Arduino clones for a quarter the price of the "real" thing when I was a broke student. ATMega MCUs for a dollar a piece, free shipping. They worked perfectly fine. Could not have afforded them without eBay. I'm Canadian, and last I checked, the shipping costs to get parts from places like digikey was just ridiculous.
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  I didn't say they don't work, just that I don't expect them to work. The prices are such that you can, and should, buy three items from three different vendors and cross your fingers that one works. In professional engineering, where time is money, Digi-Key or Mouser is always more efficient, if they've got what you need. For personal stuff, where the value of your time is ~zero, the opposite can be true.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  99%+ of my hobbyist electronics bits n' bobs are ali express/banggood specials, and they have all worked fine, from arduino clones to sensors and ESP8266's. If I were working on something more important that dinking around for fun, sure, I might care a bit more about what's actually on the board. But as it is, the clones are more than adequate for my needs, particularly at their price point.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    In the case of the ESP8266, the parts were available through channels like eBay and AliExpress long before they showed up through any of the typical electronics distributors. Same thing goes for other first-in-China parts like the GD32 series (STM32 clone) and WCH340 series (USB/serial).
ckocagil 6y ago
I do electronics as a hobby. I sometimes buy chips from very dubious shops in China for fun. Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Then I decap the chip by boiling the package in acid and inspect the die under a microscope. More than half of them are genuine. I get some nice surprises because even the chips that I expect to be absolutely fake can turn out to be genuine. So far I've seen a ton of fake audio op-amps. For discrete parts like transistors things are much simpler. Just build a simple test rig and test a few parameters. If they fall within the specs they're probably good enough. Of course it's not worth it to do this for jellybeans like 2N3904, but when some parts get obsoleted without a replacement (or they're too pricey) there isn't much else a lone hobbyist can do.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Links? That sounds fun...
- boznz 6y ago
  they also may be refurbished ie unsoldered off a board. that happened to me a few years back for a bunch of soic op-amps I was having difficulty sourcing.. they worked ok though.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Not so with power transistors, you don't need a microscope to see that the dies found in off-brand power transistors are suspiciously small compared to equivalents from proper manufacturers.

jerkstate 6y ago

I’m sure these things have made it into a lot of those Arduino beginner kits and stuff like that. It really makes me mad because the various incompatibilities with the datasheet might frustrate a beginner or mislead them to think they are doing something wrong.

myself248 6y ago

I'd never expect to find these in official products from trusted brands, but off-brand crap? Oh yeah. DIY kits? Absolutely. The parts drawer at the makerspace? One hundred percent. So much stuff on eBay is free shipping, that's huge when you only need a few dollars worth of stuff. If I could convince Digi-Key to lick a 55-cent stamp when I need ten of something, instead of charging me $7 for shipping, I'd have a lot fewer counterfeit parts around.

fennecfoxen 6y ago
There will be no licking of 55 cent stamps. US stamps have been 100% self-adhesive since 2016ish. The envelope is of course another matter.
- sfgweilr4f 6y ago
  Not to mention the obvious, but that glue isn't necessarily that great* for you either. * allegedly of course.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Is this a Seinfeld reference, or something else I’m not understanding correctly? :)
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    the old fashioned glue is gum arabic... gum arabic sees more uses these days in food than outside it
IgorPartola 6y ago
This. I buy a decent amount of hobby electronics from eBay and AliExpress because yes it is cheaper. When I need quality, Mouser, DigiKey, and McMaster-Carr are there for me. But the minimum $7-9 shipping is the main reason is forego them. I’d gladly pay 2x for small electronic components (vs directly from China options) if shipping wasn’t a problem.

godelski 6y ago

Lots of hobbiests will buy things off ebay, Amazon, or Alibaba. It is extremely common and if you go into forums it is even encouraged. I'm not saying you should go to those places, but that lots of people do.

fermienrico 6y ago
We've spoiled ourselves with CCP subsidy. It wasn't like that about 20 years ago. You'd pay a pretty penny for things and support local/national businesses. Now, you're funneling fuel into the dragon's mouth. For what? A hobby project? Just spend the $7 shipping and get it from Digikey.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Shipping fee is not supported by CCP subsidy but by Universal Postal Convention.
- julianz 6y ago
  Just went to my local Digikey site. Shipping is $20 USD or $26 NZD.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    I presume you’re in NZ: You also live in the Southern Hemisphere, way south. YMMV. I presume ordering literally anything besides AliExpress/eBay us expensive in New Zealand.

JKCalhoun 6y ago

Shipping cost is the biggest downer for a hobbyist just wanting a couple chips from Digikey or Mouser.

flingo 6y ago

I've often bought parts from aliexpress because they're available for <$2 with shipping, and can be somewhat vetted easily with an example arduino sketch that comes with the library. (IMO, the goal in designing a board for your problem is getting someone to clone it and sell it for cheaper than you could hope to build it. Ideally, better too) Sparkfun and adafruit deserve commendation here, as their designs are open enough to even have low effort clones work reasonably well. (I'd buy a legit version if I was doing something professional, but prototyping for the sake of research is a different story) I'm a special case though, since deliveries from the local AVNET subsidiary to my employer are often comped due to volume/location.

mindslight 6y ago

How else can you get anything from Maxim besides samples? (joke may be a decade out of date)

metaphor 6y ago
I understood that joke to mean, "Maxim components are so expensive that the grey market is about the only place the layman can afford them in more than 1-off prototype quantities." At least that was my experience 8 or so years ago when I made the mistake of purchasing a lot of 100 MAX7219 off eBay for $100 shipped from China...$1/ea was such a tempting deal to a younger, more naive self when these chips were selling for upwards of $7/ea from ECIA-authorized distributors at the time. Never fell for that trap again.
- pravda 6y ago
  >I made the mistake of purchasing a lot of 100 MAX7219 off eBay Why was it a mistake? I've used the 'fake' ones. Did not have any problem with them.
  - metaphor 6y ago
    The fundamental problem with counterfeits is that they aren't held to any published spec, so comparing your experience to mine isn't really meaningful...other than being not genuine, you can't generalize anything about counterfeits. It was so long ago, I had to dig up notes. On the performance side, the counterfeits I received couldn't be clocked anywhere near the 10 MHz limit specified by a genuine MAX7219; one package pin that should be tied to GND was floating internally (contributing to poor thermal performance); but the real showstopper was that intensity control didn't work for shit. My records reflect nigelectronics on eBay as the counterfeit seller. This is the address I was instructed to return the counterfeits to when I called them out on it for a refund (I eventually got the refund, but threw these counterfeits in the trash where they belong): Cheng Kwok Hang 15F, BLK 1, Aldrich Garden, 2 Oi Lai Street, Shau Kei Wan, Hong Kong On the business side, I effectively wasted 10 days lead time in a tight pipeline just waiting for this garbage to arrive + more time/frustration isolating why the chips were failing initial tests; swallowed ~$700 out of pocket + expedited shipping for a single BOM line item to purchase genuine replacements from an authorized distributor; and looked like a complete hobbyist amateur to a collaborator in NYC (who was working on the mechanical side) as I had to explain why my stupid decisions meant he'll have to wait another 2 weeks before receiving the pre-production prototypes I had promised (which meant his clients ultimately had to bear that burden). Then there was all the manual rework which I didn't even keep track of. This was my first semi-pro side gig out of college, and juggling all the unexpected curve balls with a fulltime day job was quite stressful.

jeffbee 6y ago

It does seem like the headline is misleading, as surely the unit-weighted average authenticity of these parts leans towards 1.0. Surely nobody would buy these by the 1000's from unofficial channels?

bigiain 6y ago

You might not buy em from eBay/Alibaba - but the guy your contract manufacturer goes to might end up getting them from the same source as the eBay/Alibaba vendors do - either knowingly or unwittingly. We ended up with 3 spools of counterfeit WS2812Bs that had cheapskated out on some data line capacitors on the die. Totally fucked the emitted RF noise levels compared to the same thing build with genuine ones, and intermittently flaked out when trying to run high speed data updates long-ish distance - the lights 6-7m and 40-50 leds from the controller weren't reliable... Manufacturer and their supplier were very good at fixing things for us once the problem was discovered and attributed to bad components, but it was a very stressful lead to the xmas supply chain back then. (Then the entire company fell apart for different reasons, but the stress and expense of that incident was quite likely a strong contributor to those the triggering of those company-ending reasons... :shrug:)

as-j 6y ago
Yeah, that's what scares me. On the other hand...I do have to trust my CM for so much already. Trust is an interesting thing in business.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

I live outside the US. Both Digikey and Mouser will charge me $20+ to ship anything (tried with a small capacitor). Farnell will let me put stuff in the shopping cart, then when I select "individual" as the customer type, tells me that they only ship to companies and redirects me to a "partner site" for individuals, which promptly fails to load (things like this have conditioned me to avoid official distributors). RS will gladly sell me 4000 of those capacitors. For a hobbyist outside of the US, AliExpress is often the only realistic source aside from the local RadioShack equivalent which probably doesn't have what you need.

jbay808 6y ago
A lot of the time, these struggles are invisible to those living in the US. It's similar with McMaster-Carr; typically an American hobbyist will ask why one would look anywhere else for hardware parts, not knowing that (at least for many years) they would only ship to corporate partners for orders outside the US.
- robk 6y ago
  This is the situation https://raptorsupplies.com https://raptorsupplies.com specializes in, Getting high quality parts at relatively small order sizes shipped easily overseas at reasonable prices
  - xxs 6y ago
    I am not sure what you suggest - I tried finding something random and trivial: a decent 100uf, 400v capacitor (needed for a switching power supply primary) - zero. z0107 (low powered triac, 600v, 0.8A) - nothing. bt134 (another popular triac) - nothing. BQ24735 (Battery charger control chip) - nothing. 2n7002 (N-ch mosfet)... I can safely say the site is not usable for electronics. It returned valves, pipes,nuts - pretty much useless for anything in Europe, being non-metric.
    - ZeikJT 6y ago
      I think they were talking about the McMaster-Carr situation, since that is what they generally supply.

whatusername 6y ago

So I ordered a ds18b20 sensor last year from ebay. paid AUD $1.88 for it (including shipping). Digikey looks to be $7 plus $20 shipping (and I'm not certain if those are USD or AUD) As someone who doesn't do this for work - I've never seen/heard of digikey or farnel before. Maybe if I was ordering enough to hit the $60 free shipping limit - but I don't think I've spent that on electrical bits in the last year.

joshvm 6y ago
In Oz, you could try Element14 (which is Farnell rebranded). $50 for free shipping, or $15 under. The DS18B20's are about $7 on there too, so that's the correct AUD price. Also check out RS Components Australia. They often offer free shipping with no minimums. https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/temperature-sensors-humidity-sensors/5402849/ https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/temperature-sensors-humidity-... RS is also a good place to buy decent mechanical bits and pieces (bearings, drill bits, etc) if you don't want to play the lottery on Amazon. They even do their own 3D printing filament which I've had some good results with. If you need small quantities (like one-of), you should look at sample requests. This is still alive and well - almost all the big manufacturers still honour them. I've gotten some $40 RTD digitising chips from Analog, micro-coax cables from Samtec and lots of random bits over the years. You may need a non-generic email address, but that's easy to sort. For example you can sample the DS18B20 straight from Maxim: https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/sensors/DS18B20.html/tb_tab3 https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/sensors/DS18B20....

omgtehlion 6y ago

I live in Russia. Some time ago it was possible to buy from these distributors (and pay additional $20 - $50 for shipping). Nowadays they ship only to companies, not domestic addresses, so it is not only cost-prohibitive for cheap orders, but outright impossible for a hobbyist or individual person.

ChrisRR 6y ago

This affects many suppliers where they see a cheaper source for their component and go for it. You may be subject to it if you send your designs and BOMs to a PCB house who also source and populate the components, then you're at the mercy of their procurement process

magicalhippo 6y ago

> who would you ever go to ebay instead of digikey In addition to the shipping price for DigiKey which means batching up stuff is essential, one reason I buy stuff on AliExpress is that there are tons of ready-made breakout modules for easier prototyping. Adafruit and SpakFun do make some, but there are quite a lot of interesting modules you cannot get from those sources.

janekm 6y ago

The DS18B20 clones are very popularly assembled into a waterproofed probe with a cable and metal cap. It's a very useful item which as far as I know is difficult to obtain from one of the official distributors (and would cost significantly more than the eBay specials).

joshvm 6y ago
You can buy those metal sensor sheaths separately. Search for something like "rtd sheath metal" e.g. ebay #162885663706. $2-3 for a set of 5. Then you pot the sensor with something thermally conductive and waterproof - waterproof potting compound is cheap (e.g. "RS PRO White Epoxy Potting Compound"). Finally heatshrink the outside. You will never beat China prices, but this is one of those parts that's relatively easy to make yourself and shouldn't cost a fortune. The most expensive stuff is the epoxy, but it will last for a while. Purely on performance, does it matter? If it doesn't matter if you're off by a degree or two, then the cheap versions will be OK. If you need the guarantee of a genuine sensor, or a different cable length, or whatever, it'll cost about $20 for five.

allo37 6y ago

Hah, first company I worked for involved the development of embedded systems and the boss wasn't shy about buying parts from AliExpress (thankfully most of it was still DigiKey). Some stuff had a significant cost difference: Official Omron rotary encoders vs copies, for example. Of course they usually worked about 70% as well as the real thing.