/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Junked out a lot of stuff when I was young.
I use labeled coffee cans for other stuff like fuses, inductors, knobs, pots, connectors, ect.

>>620048
ok, box #680. please tell me the handle is worn because it melted or something and not from like 100 years of regular use o_o

I'm running out of random bins and cups, where can I buy those bins in the OP locally in the US? I couldn't find any at places like Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart, Target, etc.

>>620056
Mine are actually from Michaels, which is a craft store, so they're made for beads and stuff. Perfect for smaller components

>>620056
Walmart.
In sporting goods dept. with fishing stuff

>>620070

Is that an AY-3-8912?

I picked this row of power transistors out of some Sony brand soundsystem, here with their nice big heatsink

The butter's a little messier than I'd like

I was actually gonna make a thread about organization. I'm new to this stuff and quickly amassing more stuff than I can easily haul around.

I don't have a dedicated work space or bench, nor the means to get one. I mostly use the kitchen table.
I keep most bulky stuff, like meter, battery housings, alligator leads, etc, in an old ammo can. Capacitors and Resistors in the boxes they shipped in. Other misc wire bundles, transistors, etc, in another shipping box.

I'm about to drop $300+ on more stuff, including a soldering iron, stand, magic hands, and a bunch of other stuff, and know it's gonna be nigh impossible to haul all that around. So what do I do? Can a normal plastic toolbox do the job? Or should I use a tackle box? Do they make dedicated electronics toolboxes?

And how do I get a good spread of resistors? I got like 20 different "common" values in a pack a while back but somehow every project I find calls for new values that I don't have and I end up making frankenstein resistor series that add up to the required resistance.

>>620134

On ebay you can get 2200 resistors of various standard values for around 7 dollars.

>>620106
yeah, how wasteful

that amount of heat sink compound harms thermal conductivity rather than helping

>>620209
How?

>>620221
it insulates the metal. The purpose of the compound is to improve heat transfer between two objects (metal plates) that can't make complete contact. The thermal compound is significantly better than air bubbles or gaps between the two metals. Efficient usage of thermal grease is to use as little as necessary between two polished pieces of metal and put as much pressure on them as is feasible, then wipe away any excess

>>620221
Heat sink compound conducts heat quite badly. Its only purpose is to displace air, which is even worse heat conductor. Those transistors have mica washers, so the effect of the extra goop is probably minimal.

The only significantly worse thermal coupling materials of those tested were peanut butter, lip balm, duct tape, and paper

>>620039
>keeping boxes of old shit around
This always seems like a good idea, but it's rarely as good an idea as you thought it was. I used to do this, and the shit would sit around for literally *years* and I'd never use any of it except for one or two parts simply because I never had exactly what I needed and ended up buying new parts. Take my word for it, unless you know some broken thing has exactly the parts you need in it, the space is more valuable than the used parts.

Where can i salvage components and how? Just attacking a motherboard with a soldering iron?
Also, is there some kind of an archive for all these parts on the web?

>>620309
You do have a point, but there are plenty of useful parts to be obtained from certain devices. Any printer is a score of motors and optical sensors, radios are full of plenty of useful things (esp if you're working with RF) and almost any other device can get you a bunch of other things like LEDs, caps, buttons, heatsinks, transistors (sometimes), and transformers.
You're right though, most of the time any parts found in something are really very specialized for that something. Resistors, and to a lesser degree capacitors are very much an example of this. (that being said I have a shamefully large collection of both)

>>620224
mayonnaise did quite well.

mica is used because it's also a good electrical insulator which can be important as many chips actually have the thermal coupling interface connected to ground.

>>620098
>>620106
these appear to have both mica pads and thermal goo.

this means there appears to be three layers of thermal compound. so instead of two transitions from the chip to the thermal compound to the heatsink, it has to go from the chip to the thermal goo to the mica to the goo to the heatsink. you use one or the other not both.

you realise that there is quite a lot of thermal resistance between layers of materials right?

>>620431
Yo I didn't put that shit on there, Sony did.

>>620431
You have to do it that way if you want to use mica washers and mica is needed, if you want electrical insulation. Or mica was needed. Nowadays everyone uses silicone washers or other materials which don't need goo.

>>620056
any craft store where they sell beads and stuff, place like crafts 2000.

What do you guys do with salvaged components that have had their legs trimmed pretty far back? Still re-use them? Or do you cherry-pick parts?

>>621619
If they were on PCBs, the leads will be long enough for PCBs.