Electronics

Where do you shop for electronic parts and tools?

33 Comments

Solder Accessories

Mitch and I are in the process of compiling a list of places to buy electronics parts and tools for a book we are writing about getting started with AVR microcontrollers.

Where do you go to buy electronic parts, tools, and other supplies?  Do you have a walk-in store in your area, or do you shop online?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from readers outside of the United States.  If you live in South America, where do you buy soldering irons, solder, resistors, capacitors, and other odds and ends?  Do you buy locally or online?  What about Europe?  Asia?  Africa?

If you do have a favorite place to shop for electronics goodies, leave a comment here or consider adding it to the MightyOhm Wiki!

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33 thoughts on “Where do you shop for electronic parts and tools?”

  3. the two places i walk into first for electronics and tools are jaycar electronics (jaycar.com.au) and recently found locally altronics (altronics.com.au)

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  5. In La Paz, Bolivia the Colombia street is the place to go for electronic components. It is located in the downtown and has many stores.
    In Monterrey, Mexico is posible to go to 5Hz-electronica, it is in Av. Raúl Rangel Frías 3528. Col. Rangel Frías

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  6. In the UK Maplin are easy if you have a shop nearby but very expensive. Farnell have a very good range but also pricey. I usually order online from Farnell, JPR (jprelec.co.uk) or Rapid (rapidonline.com).

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  7. I am currently in Tokyo, Japan.

    Biggest advantage is that there is a whole district filled with electronics shops, Akihabara. My favourite one are Akizuki Denshi, Sengoku, Radio Center (actually a building filled with booths), V-Stone (robotic parts) and CocoNet (LCD related stuff).

    I also used Farnell while I was back in Turkey, offers a good service.

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  8. I live in Saudi Arabia. Parts stores? Forgeddaboudit! So, you think mail order is an option? Good idea, except … there is no reliable postal service in all of Saudi Arabia. True. Unless you work for an embassy or something like that.

    So, how do I get components? I get them in London, UK, or in Hong Kong.

    Forward planning. I figure out the parts I need, plus misc stuff for messing around, and on my (roughly) twice a year trip to the UK, I head down to Maplin. Or on my roughly annual trip to HK, I head up to Sham Shui Po (a section of HK served by the metro/underground) and buy stuff I need from the little shops there.

    In short, it’s not easy. And you wouldn’t believe the difficulty sometimes getting parts out via airport security and then into Saudi through airport customs. Electronic components, solder, wire, displays all in my bag….I get them in, but I have some tricky moments occasionally.

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  9. I’m from Germany and ordered lots of stuff for my robotics team from:

    reichelt.de
    A huge and reasonable priced German store.

    conrad.de
    Conrad is a huge German electronics supplier with big stores in nearly every big city but I didn’t buy much stuff from them, they are laughably expensive for most electronic components, but have some components not to be found anywhere else.

    rs-online.com and farnell for hard-to-find components

    shop.robotikhardware.de
    An online shop with lots of robotics-specific modules/components

    watterott.de for lots of interesting open source hw, sparkfun stuff and lots more

    q-p.de for cheap high quality pcbs

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  12. Thank you for your wonderful suggestions and recommendations! It is very comforting to know that there is a local or convenient mail-order source for electronic parts pretty much everywhere in the world!

    For those who are having trouble posting to the wiki, you need to be a registered user. You can quickly and easily register here:

    http://mightyohm.com/wiki/start?do=register

    Thank you again to everyone who has replied here or contributed to the wiki!

    Reply

  14. For those in Estonia there is the great Oomipood (two stores in Tallinn, and others in Tartu and Rakvere). Great stock of everything you could want – from soldering irons, tools and breadboards, through every type of component to cables for audio, TV etc. They look to be stockists for Farnell, so even esoteric bits or large quantities can be had if you don’t mind a few days wait.
    Best of all is that they are only 100m from my flat!

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  15. I live in Gothemburg, Sweden, (second biggest city btw.) and get most of my components over counter at a store called Tema Elektronik (no webpage unfortunatly), very nice little store with a mix of vintage and new components at ok prices.
    Smaller over counter stores are scarce here, but there are a few domestic webshops (www.electrokit.se http://www.swechtrading.se …)
    There is also a big company called Elfa (www.elfa.se) with a pretty large assortment, that mostly cater to the electronics industry, they are famous for their brick like catalog wich is filled to the brim with datasheets, and in famous for their outragous prices, sometimes up to three times that of mouser or digikey!

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  16. In Toronto, Canada, the place I have been going to for the last 10 years has been “Supremetronic”.

    It’s essentially run by two older Chinese men who know their inventory inside and out. From electrical components, to any kind of connector, to rare FETs from Japan, to AVRs and PICs, they have pretty much everything. They’re so organized, I’m convinced that if you took a 1% 10k resistor and put it in the 10% bin they would be able to tell even without looking.

    For a long time, they had a storefront on Queen street, but I guess the retail value of the property increased dramatically and either the rent went too high or they sold it their building, because they eventually moved to a computer store down Spadina on College. Then they must have sold that building too. Currently, they are co-habitating with College Home Hardware.

    In Toronto, if you’re more interested in random mechanical parts, any kind of cable, wire, motor, etc, the place to go is Active Surplus

    In north Toronto, you can go over to “component corner”; there’s Active Electronics and ElectroSonic among others whose names escape me right now (one of which has a really great selection of FPGAs).

    In Montreal, I would suggest Addison.

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  17. In Dallas, we have the wonderful Tanner Electronics at Diplomat and Valwood, just west of I-35 in Carrolton. Family run, surplus electronic EVERYTHING parts and a great supporter of the local battle bots community. Resistors 6c ea for 1/2w flavors, a bajillion different transistors (I got some for 14c ea this weekend to repair an old Bendix car radio!). They may not exactly have everything, but you’d be shocked at what you can find there and how cheap it can be at times.

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  18. Hey Jaff,

    I’m from New Zealand, and I mostly buy online. element 14, RS Electronics, and Futurlec Australia.

    eBay is also a great place to get parts, more so if they are used for arduinos. I get bulk lots like capacitors and resistors from there. Also, ICs are very cheap in quantities.

    In New Zealand, Jaycar is the best place to walk in and buy parts. They have everything you could need for simple projects, but are rather expensive, and forget about PICs… They don’t sell AVRs though.

    Cheers,

    Dan

    Reply

  19. If you are Bangalore, India and looking for electronic components, the place is “SP Road”. A street about 2 miles long lined either side with stores selling electronic components.

    I of-course shop at my local Frys’ in Austin. There used to be ‘MC Howard’ at Braker-Burnet but it’s closed now.

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  20. You guys are awesome!

    Thank you for the many recommendations!

    I am compiling a list for the book this week and will be looking at each and every one of the places you all mentioned. Not all of them will make it in, but I will try to select the best ones.

    If you don’t see the place you mentioned in the wiki, consider adding it!

    Thank you!

    Reply

  22. In Barrie, Ontario, Canada. Sayal Electronics (www.sayal.com) has recently opened a store. They also have a few other stores in around the Toronto area. They don’t have a huge selection, but not too bad. It’s nice not to have to wait for that one simple part that you’d normally have to order online.

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  23. Jameco – Prices are decent. Its mail order, however if you live in the bay area you can do a will call pickup. Whenever I’m on that side of the bay I drive over place an order and I’m out the door in 10 minutes. Saves on shipping, totally awesome.

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  24. I go to You-Do-It in MA, which someone else mentioned… the problem with that store is how HORRIBLE the sales staff is… if you walk in on a Saturday morning you’ll find nearly a 1:1 ratio of customers to sales people… my last couple of visits there have been fruitless because they simply didn’t have the items I needed.

    There’s also “Stan Rubinstein” in Foxboro, MA (http://sra-solder.com/index.htm) for soldering supplies, very good prices on Chinese solder stations… I’ve never actually gone to a physical store (if they even have one?)… I was referred to them by a colleague and bought some things online.

    Mouser/Digikey are the first places I go for components, but after seeing how expensive they are for soldering equipment, I probably would not use them for that…

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  25. I know it isn’t what you asked for, but I think this might be relevant for your book and other beginners.

    First, you might want to look at the blog “Hands on with Make: Electronics”. It’s an account of working through the book Make: Electronics. Included is some of the trials of obtaining the parts and tools.

    http://handsonelectronics.blogspot.com/

    Until very recently I was reluctant to buy parts unless I had a specific part number. The amount of choices from places like Digikey and Mouser was overwhelming and it looked too easy to make mistakes. Ideally you’ll list parts with both Mouser and Digikey part numbers where practical.

    In my mind a great resource is the Adafruit Parts Selector. It contains info including mouser and/or digikey part numbers on almost all of the components that go into making Adafruit’s kits. Combined with the parts lists for Adafruit kits being available, it allowed me to find components that have been choosen by someone who knows what they are doing *and* are very relevant to the sort of microcontroller projects I’m interested in.

    http://www.ladyada.net/wiki/partselector

    Hope This Helps,

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  28. blalor,

    Thanks for the tip about You-Do-It in MA.

    I forgot to include in the original post that we already have the big US-based ones like Digikey, Mouser, Jameco, and Newark covered, but thanks for mentioning Digikey and Mouser anyway. I expect that most people in this country order most of their electronic components from one of those four online shops!

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  29. I’m sure I won’t be the only person to list Digi-Key and Mouser. They’re the ones I use most of the time, but I only order a half-dozen times a year and I’m still a rank amateur. However, they’ve got a huge selection, and I can usually use Mouser’s kick-ass search engine to give me enough information about a device that I can force Digi-Key’s horrible one to give me the goods. Needham, MA has You-Do-It Electronics where you can pick up a Weller WES51, wire and project boxes, but they’re Radio Shacking themselves. Still, they’re just about the only local source around Boston, from what I’ve been able to ascertain.

    I’m commenting in part because I’m hoping for some good follow-up comments by e-mail. 🙂

    Reply

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