Does anyone else find it a little ironic the electronic retailer SparkFun is advocating scripts to help Digikey have a Sort By Price function? Regardless, to reiterate now Firefox (and we hear Google Chrome too) users with the Greasemonkey plugin can sort Digikey items. Personally, some of us here are just Mouser fans at heart.
[Thanks Charper and Mohonri and Satiagraha, image credit Make]
We need more of this. Digikey, Newark and Mouser’s online catalogs are all spectacularly hard to use, giving the impression of having been automatically generated from the PDFs of their print catalogs. They’re the craptastic flip side to Amazon, who I wish was in the electronic components business.
Awesome! It has always pissed me off that they allow you to sort by everything but price. Bravo.
Hey Digikey, 1998 called and they want their website back!
why do people like digikey so much? prices are identical to mouser, and mouser just has such a much nicer feel to it.
@Brian: There is something special about getting your parts from a a place called “Thief River Falls”!
@Brian: Digi-Key has quite a few things that Mouser doesn’t carry and vice versa. Same thing with Allied Electronics.
I prefer going with Mouser myself since they have no minimum order or handling charge. Most places do. Also, I’ve noticed higher prices on some DigiKey items than Mouser, but they at least have it in stock.
Bleh. I pushed this in my article suggestion. If you read through the comments on sparkfun you will find this:
”
For a couple years I’ve been using Digikey’s built in price sort feature. There’s no script to do the work for you (yet), but at least my method uses Digikey’s functions and works instantly across multiple pages, instead of having to download every single page and sort the results.
The key is inside the source for a results page. For the columns that already can be sorted, you can see a ColumnSort value. Using trial and error, I determined that the correct ColumnSort value for ascending price sort is 1000011. You can construct a request to Digikey’s server and end up with something like this: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Selection&Cat=2556317&k=74hc04&ColumnSort=1000011&stock=1
That URL returns all the in-stock products matching the keyword “74hc04″, sorted ascending by price. You can replace “74hc04″ with any desired keyword. I imagine a script to implement this could replace the value of ColumnSort with 1000011 in any search request sent to DigiKey.
”
-macetech
Much more useful! Now somebody needs to hack that into a greasemonkey script and we’re good to go.
@ Brian
Digikey has cheaper shipping (to Canadians at least)
@Paul
Digi-Key used to be cheaper/faster for shipping to Canada. They used to do 1 day shipping via Purolator for $8.00, which was great. Now they switched to UPS and only do 2-3 days shipping.
Mouser has recently started to do “duty-free / no customs” shipping to Canada also, so you don’t get outrageous import fees (like $100 duty on a $60 order).
Both Mouser and Digi-key now ship freely to Canada on orders over $200. I’ve found myself using Mouser more and more (some items cheaper, or available and not at Digi-Key, etc.)
I switched from Digi-Key to Mouser a few years back simply because the Digi-Key website is abysmal. The prices and selection are almost identical, so it wasn’t a very hard decision. In the brick and mortar retail world, the only thing that separates very similar businesses is the customer service, and there is no reason the same rule shouldn’t apply to online retailers.
This script certainly isn’t going to change my mind, and like already said, it is rather ridiculous that somebody even had to make this.
A lot of the greasemonkey scripts have worked for me just loading them directly into chrome… Just install it as an extension and for some reason it recognizes what site to use it on…
“They’re the craptastic flip side to Amazon, who I wish was in the electronic components business.”
Are you kidding? Mouser and Digikey both have vastly superior searching capabilities when compared to Amazon, especially given the sheer volume of stuff they sell.
Newegg is the real target. They have a nice search.
@jack So you are saying google stole greasemonkey code? How lame of them.
Mouser is just as good most of the time. Overall Digikey is more accurate listing parts most of the time spec wise and seems to have less redundancy in lists. Drill down to someone very specific works better at Digikey but if you don’t know exactly what you want Mouser is generally better.
It would be good if they would just build in sort by price and anything else you wish… Get with it Digikey…
I use AVNET, mostly because I know the sales rep in my area through work. I like their website a lot and it’s fairly easy to find stuff I’m looking for, but they don’t always have it in stock. Digikey is annoying on many fronts, but it would be a monumental task to overhaul their website :P
What’s with all the Digikey website hate? I, for one, don’t mind it at all – in fact, I prefer it to Mouser’s “nicer” site. The Digikey parts database serves its purpose well – clearly listing part specifications and documentation, while consuming little bandwidth. It would be nice if they had a sort by price, though.
Personally, I’ve found it much easier to find parts within Digikey’s database than Mouser’s, but that’s just me. I guess the geek in me likes that old-school text table system. Mouser’s site has always felt too “glossy” for me.
I’ve been using greasemonkey for a while now, works great. I recommend it for digikey fans!
does this mean they will stop charging noobies 5$ for a 50 cent part mounted on a super tiny pcb?
I’ve been using the Farnell-Newark site to find parts these days. They’ve revamped it – quite good IMO. Give it a try. But I rarely buy from them as their prices and/or shipping are often outrageous.
I agree, Digi-Key not having a sort by price is lame. Probably some Marketing MBA thinks it is a sales booster.
@Stonehamian: I continue to consistently get orders next day, if completed before ~6pm. Maybe they are just covering their asses.
Did a quick search on mouser, and their classification sort is better but still not as good as digikey. Seeing 0.2uF also listed as 200,000pF is annoying and messy.
Their fedex priority shipping is also quoted at 1-3 days, and costs $20.
Ehh,.. it’s not ironic really. Most projects are going to require things that Sparkfun simply doesn’t sell.
There are too many links in the summary. Really, it’s not necessary to link to Firefox or Chrome.
I’ll stick with my hard-copy catalogues.
Someone on the Sparkfun comments took my information about the ColumnSort hack and made a simple bookmarklet to sort ascending by price. Just make a bookmark with this as the URL, and when you’re looking at a page of Digikey search result click the bookmark (here’s hoping wordpress doesn’t mangle it, if so, go to Sparkfun): javascript:myForms=document.getElementsByTagName(“form”);myForms[myForms.length-1].ColumnSort.value=1000011;myForms[myForms.length-1].submit()
@ macegr:
That little script worked like a charm as a bookmark in firefox. The copy and paste mangled the double-quotes around ‘form’ causing it to not work but a little manual editing on that and it worked perfectly.
Thanks!
Digikey’s web functionality is br0ken. For instance, if you change your personal details, it is manually keyed in to their backend database. I found this out when they typoed my customer number, and I suddenly logged in and found someone else’s order history, name, address, etc.
I’ve stopped using them completely, I don’t trust them with my data.
@Whatnot:
the author of greasemonkey modifeid it to work with chrome, renamed it greasemetal
AWESOME!
I use digikey every, can’t explain how wonderful this is!
Thanks much!!!
Mouser++
Greasemonkey++
@macegr @charper
Using that column sort hack you get pages and pages of “Call” prices first sometimes. No bueno.
Digikey for components, Mouser for connectors. Both are good for each, but searching seems to go smoother as I describe. Sometimes you need a part that isn’t available on one but is on the other. And if neither, try Newark.
I think McMaster has the best site search. So much better than either mouser or digikey.
Digikey prices always more than Mousers, not by much but it quickly add up considering amount of parts needed for even a small project
Why is it that it is infinitely easier to search either of these catalogs in hard copy? I hate both websites.When I need components I usually don’t pay much attention to the price…I want the best quality I can get. I don’t build many things from scratch it is primarily repair/upgrade work.
Count me as a weirdo that much prefers the search at DK. Their paramaterized search is way better than mouser, usually with more parameters listed, and much better completion on parts actually having their data entered.
About the only things I like better about Mouser is that it does an AJAX ‘items remaining’ thing as you select parameters, which is nice, and that you can see the product list without an extra click to leave the paramaterized search.
Hard copy? Seriously? It’s hardly organized at all, half of it is by manufacturer. Only useful for connectors or weird parts like light pipes and funny shaped LEDs.
And sort by price, but this script does that. Nice.
I like the mouser.For information regarding free web scripts and buy scripts…..
Has anyone else’s script stopped working? I just get the default digikey screens now. It worked for me 3 months ago…
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Completely agree on Mouser. Shouldn’t have to use 3rd party scripts to get basic functionality out of a website. That being said, Digikey (and Mouser) don’t really cater to much to the hobbyist. They are looking for the manufacturer that is large enough to need some bulk, but small enough to not make individual contracts with major companies for parts.