PK Shiu

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Last updated: 2008.05.02

Basic Parts and Components to Stock for DIY Electronics

Working with electronics has a strange dilema. Building curcuits need a lot of components of varying values. There are thousands to choose from, and you never know if you need something that you don't have on hand. The components themselves are cheap (1 cent, 20 cents) but you cannot just run down to your local hardware store to buy them. These days the only source is mail order, which take time.

So we need to stock up. But what to stock?

Resistors

• 220 Ω - Current limiting for LED
• 470 Ω - Current limiting for LED
• 1k Ω - Current limiting for LED (lower current), esp driven from PIN directly
• 4.7k Ω - I2C and 1 wire pull up?
• 10k Ω - pull up and pull downs for button switches or 4.7k?

Capacitors

Note that capacitors of smaller values, up to 0.1uF, are available as cheap ceramic disc types. For higher value, you can either go with aluminium radial electrolytic types, or more expensive but smaller (size) tantalum types.

• Ceramic 0.1uF/50V - use for decoupling power supply lines
• Aluminium radial electrolytics: 1uF/50V, good for oscillators, 10uF/50V, 220uF/50V for audio decoupling.

Diode

Switching Diodes are used when you have to layout switches and keyboard matrix. Just get the cheapest 1N4148 available.

Transistors

Transistors? We are old school... Actually, they are useful when you need to drive something with higher current. One example is that if you want to add an indicator LED in parallel of a signal path, you do not want to "waste" any current in the signal path, so you have to switch a LED using a transistor. The 2N3904 NPN transistor is the standard choice.

LEDs

Who doesn't like LED's? blinking lights are what make DIY electronics fun. Since they are much cheaper if you buy in bulk, I order these in 100 quantity.

• T 1 34 5mm LED Red [jameco Part# 790225]
• T 1 34 5mm LED Green [jameco Part# 697531]

Integrated Circuits

There are some digital IC's that are fun to use.

• 8-bit Serial to Parallel Shift 74HC595 [jameco Part# 46105]

References

The information came from lots of googling. Some particularly useful pages are:

• The blog upward, not northward has lots of info, and this post particularly address his search for a similar part list.
• Check out what's sold at Smarkfun Electronics and you get an idea what's commonly used.