Mouser Chips Arrived! (FNR)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 25th, 2010

Hooray! I had a $50 prepaid credit card thanks to the Wolfram|Alpha “I want my money back!” program. Basically, I bought their iPhone App for $50, when I thought it was $4.99. Then they insanely dropped the price, too. I’m glad that they finally refunded us though, it is very kind and very modern of them!

I decided to buy 5 chips off of Mouser. 3 ATtiny85s, and 2 595-TLC5945PWPR 16-Ch LED Driver. The LED driver is a PWM shift out chip. It came to $15 bucks. Not too bad, right? Well, the shipping was $20. I don’t understand what was so important about the shipping. $20, seriously? OH and, I selected to pay the shipping at the door, but instead they took it off of the credit card! ARRG! So this is what my $35 went to:

1 sheet of bubble wrap:

Another sheet of bubble wrap:

Two more sheets of bubble wrap, and the electronics:

Fire pit material:

An ugly box:

Obviously that was not worth $20 of shipping. At least Sparkfun gives you a nice box that you can hack with!!! >:(

So the chips. YES! I cannot wait to see what these LED driver DIPs look like. Only the bag is sepperating me from these wonderful things now…

I open the bag, and this film reel thing slides onto the desk. What? I didn’t order a film reel?!

There’s two tiny chips inside of the film reel. But they’re NOT DIPs! I ordered a DIP because I don’t have a Weller! On the product it even said “DIP”! ARRG!

At least they got the ATtiny85s right…

So here it is. Two $5 chips and they aren’t even DIPs. I am royally doomed now. :’(

So yeah. I have no idea how I’m going to use these tiny things. I don’t have a precise soldering iron to make it work. Also, I have nothing to solder these things to! What on earth! I don’t want to go and do something extravogent, that’s why I bought the chips! All I wanted to do was drive LEDs! GRR!

Anyway, I checked out BubbleBoy to see what was going on inside of it with regards to the servos. It appears as though the wires attaching the servo to the head broke.

BubbleBoy would probably bob its head a lot better if the servos were attached to the head via metal axels. They’re only $3 at the local hobby store, so might as well buy the ones that fit this time instead of trying to aimlessly sand down the larger axels. It will be interesting to see how well the axels fare compared to the wire! ^_^ This will be a good time to refurbish BubbleBoy.

Posted in: Other, Projects.
Tags: arg, axel, bubble wrap, DIP, lame, Mouser, pointless, shipping, stupid, sucks, waste

4 Responses to “Mouser Chips Arrived! (FNR)”

1. Ron Says:
   July 7th, 2010 at 11:17 AM

   Oh, I know your pain when it comes to packages. Order DIPs and get surface mount. Just wait until you order DIPs, get DIPs, but realize they are the “wide” ones (twice the width) instead. I often have to open up the spec sheets and triple-check the physical measurements. What a drag.

   Maybe one of those Schmartboards might help you utilize the surface mounts? We’ve used them on a couple of projects where DIPs weren’t available. Might be worth looking into, because the TI PWM drivers appear to be all surface mount. They do make some DIP drivers (like the TLC5917INE4), but those don’t have PWM. Good drivers, though.

2. Ricky Brais Says:
   July 15th, 2010 at 10:09 AM

   I verdad gustó leer blog. Excelente puestos Muy bueno Muy bueno contenido. Por favor, mantenga impresionante realmente bueno cotent.

3. Grace Rodriguez Says:
   October 6th, 2010 at 3:19 AM

   the soldering iron that i use is employing a ceramic heating element~’*

4. Decking Kits · Says:
   November 9th, 2010 at 4:30 PM

   i use those copper tipped soldering iron but after a month or two, my soldering iron tip would just break _

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