For surface mounts, get a "sample book" with 20 pages of empty sheets, then you put each tape of SMTs into each page, very compact storage much more than lots of boxes.
One day if the dream workshop ever gets built I’ll have to see if I can find those long rollout ESD mats without them costing $1 million plus inflation
@@GadgetReboot I was lucky, i fitted out the benches in my lab at the last place, the off cut did my bench as well. as you say a good mat don't come cheap. the potable repair/service mats are some times a good buy, as you get the strap and plug all in. but my adaptor is just a plug with the lead connected via a 1M resistor to the earth pin.
I just added more surface mount capacitors to the AliExpress cart. I wonder if it’s time for me to look into those little surface mount interlocking flip top trays
Stumbled upon you just now, perhaps because I've enjoyed other channels' mailbag videos. The things you bought makes your channel look even more promising! However, I buy ebay stuff myself, but I do not buy specialty opamps, that's unlikely to be the correct part. A test setup would be interesting.
when I need reliable parts I go somewhere more reputable like DigiKey or Mouser or another distributor but generally I’ve been lucky with parts except one time I tried to buy JFETS and I got NPN transistors
Buying cheap opamps from China is always a gamble; more often than not, they aren't what they claim to be. Most of the time, they are one of the twelve or so Chinese clone opamps, renamed to whatever the seller wants to market. So maybe is a good idea to measure them and see if they are on par with generic TL072s that you know are 100% real.
@@jw200 good point and I tried that. I'm trying to stop buying cheap Chinese garbage parts and making mouser and digikey orders when I know the orders are large enough to get overnight and customs free shipping. Living in Canada is a horrible place for certain things. Guitars cost a fortune, virtually any item you can measure a voltage from, plus 3d printing stuff. A prusa kit here is 2k and we have to assemble it. So I never bought one. I've got a few awesome ones now but I'm selling one today and buying a spectrum analyzer I think. There's a siglent model you can do a firmware crack and make it the same as the one which costs 4k. It can also be a vna as well but I just want it for audio, measuring antenna and renting out or for repairs. It's bananas how much a cheap one costs. I may save the money for an extended trip to Myanmar where I'm gonna rent scooters and go through all the countries under China. I want to see all the temples and eat cheap noodle dishes hahaha. I'm gonna spend a month or 2 farting around there for a month or 2 this fall. Sorry. I oftentimes go off topic. I think the quality depends on the batch as I tried like 3 different cartridge types.
I haven’t had trouble with those adaptor boards but in general only if too much work has been done on the pad and maybe there was either too much heat or if trying to clean off solder with a copper braid, moving it around instead of keeping it in one spot can scrape a delicate pad away.
