PIC chips from China, shipped in Styofoam

[wdmagic]

you have several types of foam

Styrofoam (White cooler type) can hold lots of static electricity, if you get a chip shipped on this, wrap foam and chip in aaluminum foil and ground it, remove chip using ground strap on wrist. if you want to store chips on white foam, wrap the foam with foil before adding chips

Pink Foam (can be foam rubber type or plastic bubble type) this is fine for shipping, basic ESD protection, minior conductivity, provides mostly antistatic control. not reccomended for CMOS devices

Grey Foam (foam rubber) pretty much like white styrofoam, not recomended for chips.

Black Foam (True Antistatic Foam) this is the choice item for storing chips in foam, its antistatic, and its conductive foam. best choice other than antistatic plastic chip carrier tubes.

Tubes are the best, if they are antistatic. They keep pins from being bent, and are fairly cheap. Save tubes and black foam from items shipped to you.

[rmteo]

Since you are located in the USA, you can get common electronic components such as PICs very efficiently from reputable distributors like Mouser, Digikey and/or even Microchip Direct. Why take the risk of buying from auction sellers?

[Chirpy]

for me, the reason is most of those places dont allow paying with paypal, only credit card, which is the reason I order over ebay. also the parts are a bit cheaper by the time you factor in shipping and everything too. ebay allows you to use paypal and at cheaper prices, but at longer shipping time.

[Graham]

The black foam ESD protection material is a carbon loaded foamed polymer with a relatively high bulk conductive value. It also has the property of degrading into a crumbly mess over time, giving off some sort of corrosive product. I lined some plastic drawers with the black packaging material around ten years ago and stored most of my mos transistors, cmos and memory chips in the drawers. I found sometime recently that some of the least used devices stored in the foam had started to show signs of corrosion and adhesion to the foam on the pins. Maybe a reaction with atmospheric moisture or materials in the foam causes this. Devices stored from much earlier in the plastic shipping tubes show no such deterioration.