Um. What?

So I received my *big* digikey order today and I began the nerd ritual of unboxing. First thing that catches my eye is a label that reads “RES 1.2K OHM 1/4W 5% CARBON FILM” only to be stapled to a bag of plastic connectors (which I didn’t order either). Oh well, only part out of the order, but for a hand picked thing I’m surprised there wasn’t any check for mistakes before packaging…. too bad I didn’t receive a pile of IGBT bricks or something better.

So a quick 1-800 call and I manage to find out that it must have been in the same row, maybe the same bin and digikey hand-picks all their orders anyways, so for a low error rate, just my luck I might have to return these ones, which would suck due to S&H and customs. I didn’t even get the metal pins so these connectors are kinda useless too….

Update: I got charged $0.61 for the resistors, and zero for the S&H cause they made a mistake and likely will ship Monday. Good luck for my first Digikey order…. now if that catalog will arrive I can collapse my bookshelf.

How Not to Do It – Fume Hoods

Well, PHD Comics did it again:

It’s too true since more than once, a certain lab at my university which will remain unnamned, repeatedly spills various thiols from their stock bottles in the fume hood. These aren’t just run of the mill methyl or ethyl thiols, they’re branched ‘who knows what they would do to you’ kind of thiols that can be smelled several buildings away. The worst bit is that they decided to put the collective fume-hood exhausts *right next to the main building air intake*.

The last time a spill happened everyone on campus could smell it, however I was already in a different chem lab with 6 fume hoods sucking air out, so for some reason I never smelled anything while everyone was in a panic over natural gas (and evacuated the library 2 buildings over).

ACTA – Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement – Horribly Wrong.

Well, if you haven’t heard of ACTA yet, its cause the participant governments don’t want you to hear about it. Its being drafted currently (and has been for several months) to ‘prevent piracy’, but it has much more significant implications overall. Under the pretext of fighting true counterfeit products and commercial piracy that causes actual significant loss to both right holders and consumers, it seems to target more specifically the everyday citizen.

As an iPod owner myself, I find this disturbing because it is difficult to determine whether or not a particular song is pirated or not. ACTA would allow border officials to randomly search any electronic device with several disturbing clauses:

• ex officio authority to act on infringers: The ability to act on infringers without legal recourse from the IP rights holder
• ‘Civil enforcement’ – ex parte searches: The ability to search items and possessions without a lawyer present
• Provisions for judicial authorities to pay the right holder(s) fines: Arbitrary, trial-less punishment, ACTA would allow government officials to force you to pay fines based on already shoddy laws under the pretext of ‘terrorism’ or other bandwagons.
• Provisions for confiscation and destruction of IP violating property. Wouldn’t this let them take, keep and suppress any evidence for you to fight their decision?

Doesn’t this make a small group judge, jury, and executioner without any oversight? I already mentioned the lack of transparency in the Canadian government by removing certain programs which allow for people to watch the government.

http://ipjustice.org/wp/2008/03/25/ipj-white-paper-acta-2008/ has a much better explanation and commentary of the leaked document regarding ACTA found here: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2008/05/22/leaked-us-govt-discussion-paper-on-proposed-anti-counterfeiting-trade-agreement-acta-from-wikileaks/
Disclaimer: IANAL, this is only an informative statement towards the public.

I felt I needed to put that disclaimer in because sooner or later, any public outcry against government policy will be illegal.

Irony

If there is a definition of irony, Slashdot appreciates it. Also, link to the article.

The fruits of downtown Toronto

Well, today I decided to roam around downtown Toronto and do a little shopping… not just any shopping though. I went to Active Surplus Electronics (on Queen Street east of Spadina) followed by Supremetronics (aka Honson, just west of College and Spadina).

Active Surplus is mostly get-lucky style shopping, you’ll never know what exactly you’ll need and probably buy some extra random things and go out with some needed items, some random items, and short a few critical items.

Positives:

• Good random surplus, I found some very good quality linear 50k pots, a 4×4 keypad, and a d10
• Really cheap utility parts, resistors, LED’s, caps (all types, large range)
• Electromechanical parts such as stepper motors, motors, solenoids, fans are available from small model scale to commercial/light industrial scale motors.
• Mechanical parts: screws by the pound, hinges, rods, gears (alot of gears of different size and type), wheels
• Utility labware: small plasticware or glassware on the cheap, and even further real glassware (I found a few Liebig condensers, and even a Soxhlet extractor)
• Random bits and bobs

Negatives:

• Overpriced on certain items such as project boxes, connectors, perf boards (aka protoboard, vector board, strip board, etc),
• Premium items are, well, premium and behind the counter in a wall of shelves, things like LED’s other than your standard R,Y,G (eg: blue, orange, luxeon LED’s) and more importantly undocumented that they are in stock.
• In general alot of prices are undocumented, mostly due to there being too many items to tag since they aren’t tracked via inventory, simply by bulk, making it hard to budget out a shopping trip.
• Not all items are available for common components either due to high popularity (eg: 1kohm 1/4W resistor) or due to obscurity.

After Active Surplus I had most of the parts to start up my stock for prototyping but I was missing a fair few components, which lead me to Supremetronic (aka Honson). Honson are a dedicated electronics components store, featuring a much wider assortment of IC’s and semiconductors, as well as better tolerance components (due to the components being non-surplus).

Positives:

• Very good assortment of IC’s such as 7400 series (LS, HC, HTC flavours), various transistors/SCR/diodes/TRIAC’s, etc, regulators, optoisolators, and pretty much anything else necessary for building a circuit.
• Premium components and wider assortment: better quality parts, more available values.
• Prototyping aimed part selection

Negatives:

• Greater expense on many parts, some neccessary, some not.
• Lack of electromechanical parts

Also note both Active and Honson give 10% student discounts upon showing a student ID card, always a bonus. I spent a fair bit of money at it too, and I’m still sorting out all the little bits and pieces, rather, resorting all the resistors after realizing that my multimeter’s batteries had leaked and made the ohmmeter inaccurate.

As for ‘how not to do it’, behold, anxiousness with a blue LED:

Disclaimer: releasing the magic blue smoke may void your warranty and cause any device to cease functioning.

Once I had mis-read a 3ohm resistor for a 300 ohm resistor (oops) I managed to drive the blue LED with enough power to make it glow white before the silicon started to decompose, generating gas and escaping out one of the areas by the leads. I got bored and sawed it open to survey the damage, nifty actually seeing inside one of them… too bad its broken.

Soon enough I shall order an Arduino and start prototyping, I have a nifty 4×4 keypad with big buttons and no labels which is perfect for a mini-midi drum pad or sampler (without velocity sensitivity mind you). Stay tuned for more stuff soon… and yes I did find a d10 at Active Surplus.