Sometimes you see an excellent post somewhere else on the web, and then discover that it is one of a series of similarly good posts that you completely missed when they were published. If you are a Hackaday scribe you are left wondering how you managed to pass them by, and then why on earth you didn’t think of writing them yourself.
Such is the case with [Sanket Gupta]’s excellent series for Octopart, of posts titled “How to select a…” and then a class of component. It was the latest, “How to select a voltage regulator” that caught our eye first, but then we found the previous installments dealing with capacitors, resistors, inductors, connectors, IC packages and MCUs. Each one provides a basic primer for the engineer, in terms of both parts selection based on capability and on suitability for manufacturing, and while you may think that only an inexperienced reader might find benefit in such pieces the reality is that everybody can learn something.
So if you are involved in choosing electronic parts, no matter at what level, take a look at this series. If you know everything [Sanket] has to say then we congratulate you on your mastery of the field, however we think most readers will find them to be an interesting and useful resource.
Header image: Kae [Public domain].
lol, I took one look at the article picture and then looked towards the author name expecting to see [Jenny List] and my expectations were met.
There are some components that I am not sure about and where is the germanium diode?
I can’t remember what CB channel 27.140MHz was.
And that HP dot matrix 7 segment … what a gem.
I see early electro-mechanical which is new again.
I thought you were from England that used PAL “I” so where is the 64uS delay line lol.
Love your articles.
Many soviet made parts too.
I want to know how the secret to searching for connectors. I’ve been hopelessly searching for a mate to a blackberry keyboard flexi cable end for hours on end, callipers in hand, but have yet to hit the jackpot. Have even tried a reverse image lookup on google. Hopeless.
I once looke through the pictures of 500+ connectors on digikey to find the one I neeeded in the last 5. Seriously, measure pitch, nr of pins and anything else you can deduct, use the parametric search of digikey/mouser/farnell and hope for the best:-)
That could be a proprietary part.
Its probably a bosch secret
This is why I used to love paper catalogs for bathroom study. If you can find a service manual they usually have the connectors listed unless it is like starhawk says and it is proprietary. I hear ya though, it is a sea of possibilities that floods itself like staring at the freakin matrix or something sometimes. Ooh pitch is right, right number of pins, wrong vertical height, one pin has a xover for some proprietary application etc. It is pretty crazy. Your best bet me be finding a bricked similar and heat and pull. Best of luck :)
Thanks @loser! What we need is an open standard for parametric search… Suppliers would have a vested interest in supporting the standard in order to get orders, vendors could use it to identify the matching tech notes/app notes/datasheets and kicad et al would also have an easier time of it when it came to identifying part libraries. One can dream…
You are entirely correct, eccentricelectron. I was aiming my comment towards digikey, mouser, and mainly Jameco who seem to think that sorting means, putting the thing the customer wants at the end of the search. I find it similar to digging thru a column of sand on minecraft lol. My most recent head-smashing experience dealt with a parallel ribbon connector for a defunct machine where the pins were super fat and had a wide pitch. I never found out what the connector was actually called, so I call it the Xi v 2.1 in honor of Mr. Xi that shipped the thing to me from China lol. Thank you Mr. Xi for having the foresight to copy some weird-ass connector from the early 70s lol. Yes, Martin you are also correct, they do melt a lot easier these days.
Insulation Displacement Connector – IDC Centronics
Especially connectors seem to be mostly of quite low melting plastic and get easily destroyed when you want to desolder them for recycling.
Looking forward to the “Rad Hard” flight ready component list.
;)
This is great – thanks. I only read through the ic one but I’ll keep the list for reference
The 3rd edition of “The Art of Electronics” tries very hard to address part selection in today’s world.