Exploring Cheap Tantalum Caps Of Mysterious Provenance

July 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

We’ve all heard about the perils of counterfeit chips, and more than a few of us have probably been bitten by those scruple-free types who run random chips through a laser marker and foist them off as something they’re not. Honestly, we’ve never understood the business model here — it seems like the counterfeiters spend almost as much time and effort faking chips as they would just getting the real ones. But we digress.

Unfortunately, integrated circuits aren’t the only parts that can be profitably faked, as [Amateur Hardware Repair] shows us with this look at questionable tantalum capacitors. In the market for some tantalums for a repair project, the offerings at AliExpress proved too tempting to resist, despite being advertised alongside 1,000 gram gold bars for $121 each. Wisely, he also ordered samples from more reputable dealers like LCSC, DigiKey, and Mouser, although not at the same improbably low unit price.

It was pretty much clear where this would be going just from the shipping. While the parts houses all shipped their tantalums in Mylar bags with humidity indicators, with all but LCSC including a desiccant pack, the AliExpress package came carefully enrobed in — plastic cling wrap? The Ali tantalums were also physically different from the other parts: they were considerably smaller, the leads seemed a little chowdered up, and the package markings were quite messy and somewhat illegible. But the proof is in the testing, and while all the more expensive parts tested fine in terms of capacitance and equivalent series resistance, the caps of unknown provenance had ESRs in the 30 milliohm range, three to five times what the reputable caps measured.

None of this is to say that there aren’t some screaming deals on marketplaces like AliExpress, Amazon, and eBay, of course. It’s not even necessarily proof that these parts were in fact counterfeit, it could be that they were just surplus parts that hadn’t been stored under controlled conditions. But you get what you pay for, and as noted in the comments below the video, a lot of what you’re paying for at the parts houses is lot tracebility.

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Hackaday Links: July 3, 2016

July 3, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

This week, Popular Mechanics published cutaway diagrams of ships that will be seen in Star Trek: Beyond, released later this month. This is your cue for spoilers for the remainder of this paragraph. The USS Franklin looks suspiciously like – and was likely built after – the NX-01, the titular ship of Star Trek: Enterprise. The Abrams-verse Franklin was the first Warp 4 ship, yet the prime universe NX-01 was the first Warp 5 ship, with previous ships having trouble reaching Warp 2. We must now consider the Abrams-verse Trek is not a parallel universe to prime-universe Trek and should therefore be considered a completely separate canon (yes, even the destruction of Vulcan. If you see the new Star Trek movie, the NX-01 launched in 2151, and your suggested viewing beforehand is ST:ENT, S02E24, First Flight.

The Mechaduino is a Hackaday Prize entry that turns steppers into closed-loop servos. It’s a phenomenal idea, and now it’s a Kickstarter.

Walk into a dollar store, and you’ll find stupid solar powered electronic flower pots. They’re bits of plastic that shake a plastic flower back and forth when placed in the sun. They’re selling millions, and I have no idea why. [Scott] put a jolly wrencher on one of these flower pots. Really, this is just an exercise in 3D printing, but [Scott] printed the jolly wrencher. We don’t see a lot of that, due to how difficult it is to render the wrencher in OpenSCAD.

In just a few hours, Juno will perform an insertion burn around Jupiter. Does this mean pretty pictures? Not quite yet. This is the closest a spacecraft has ever gotten to Jupiter, and over thirty or forty orbits, Juno will fly between Jupiter’s massive radiation belts. Here’s the NASA trailer.

This video recently caught the Internet’s attention. It’s squares and circles that when put next to a mirror look like circles and squares. Yes, it’s weird. People have 3D printers, so of course these ambiguous objects were quickly reverse engineered and printed. Here’s how they work

It looks like Brexit has caught up to Mouser. Here’s their country select dialog for eu.mouser.com. Thanks [Tom] for the screencap.

$50k In Components Hit The Hands Of Hackaday Prize Semifinalists

December 22, 2014 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

We anticipate a cornucopia of hacks from the top fifty 2014 Hackaday Prize entrants based on the recent awarding of the 50 grab bags of electronics. That’s right, the grand prize was out of this world but there were a lot of other rewards worth shooting for. Instead of making hardware choices without the seminifinalists’ input we went with a shopping spree on Mouser.com.

It’s a great idea if we do say so ourselves. However, it turned out not to be as easy as purchasing fifty-grand in gift cards. Did you know that none of the major parts distributors have gift card systems built into their sites? We’re of two minds on this. We’d love to open a birthday card from grannie and pull out some chits that can be traded for chips. But at the same time, it would be a longshot for your non-hacker relatives to even know what sites are our go-to parts emporiums.

Long story short these prizes are themselves a hack. We had a lot of help from the sales crew over at Mouser who abused their account tracking software in order to make these credits work. All fifty of the Hackaday prize semifinalists now have a cool G to spend and we’ll be watching their Hackaday.io accounts for updates as they inevitably use the upcoming holidays to embark on exciting builds.

A big thanks to Supplyframe Inc. for sponsoring these 50 prizes, as well as all others awarded for the 2014 Hackaday Prize. Get those workbenches cleared off and ~~sharpen~~ tin your soldering tips because details about the 2015 Hackaday Prize will start to roll out in just a few weeks. Until then, occupy your time trying to win one of the many prizes offered during our Trinket Everyday Carry Contest.

Hackaday Interview: [Grant Imahara]

November 25, 2014 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

We had a chance to interview [Grant Imahara] at the 2014 Electronica conference in Munich, Germany. If you don’t recognize [Grant’s] name you’ll probably recognize his face. He’s been on the cast of the television show Mythbusters for about 10 years now. We heard recently that he was leaving the show and that’s how we crossed paths with him.

[Grant] has signed on with Mouser Electronics to promote their Empowering Innovation Together program. They hosted him on a press junket at their booth and since we have a good relationship with Mouser they offered Hackaday an interview slot.

We had a lot of fun talking to [Grant]. Unfortunately the wireless microphones the Mouser videographer was using were picking up a lot of interference. This didn’t directly affect our recording setup as we were using a handheld voice recorder, but we kept getting interrupted as they tried to figure out the problem. Still, as you can see from the video below, we managed to get all the way through a few questions about [Grant’s] introduction to electronics at a young age, his first job out of school working for Industrial Light and Magic, and his advice to others who want to get into electronics and specifically robots. He mentions his early learning was guided by the books of Forrest Mims and that these days learning about electronics is no more than a keyword search away.

Digikey Sort By Price Script

May 11, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 38 Comments

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]

How-To: Where To Find Parts For Your Projects

November 16, 2007 by Will O'Brien 78 Comments

Hunting down the right parts usually takes more time than soldering everything together. I can’t count the number of projects that I tried to build and couldn’t find some key component that’s no longer made. You can help put together a list of suppliers at the end, but the idea is to have a quick reference to get your projects rolling (saving your money for important things, like espresso). Even if you’re familiar with the usual electronics parts shops, chime in to help me create a list of the best suppliers to fuel those hardware hacking projects.