Speaking of on-the-cheap; I was about to put in an order for 7-segment LEDs on AliExpress. But one of the colours was off, a sickly yellow-green instead of yellow, and I needed one format they didn't have online, so I sent a message to the supplier.
Dude comes back, says he's got the real yellows, but can't update the site cause there's an active sale (I guess it's an AliExpress policy that's stopping him). The best part, he says to hold on till the 12th, there's a 17% sale coming on those parts, and he'll have those good yellows listed. They also add shipping per part as your build your order, it gets crazy fast; like $120 shipping on a $400 order. So yeah, he says he can combine shipping.
I saw his name mentioned in the comments; we'll see if he's as good as he looks at first glance. Price of some parts has come down a lot; like LCD displays. But the Arduino generation is making the price of other stuff like the 7-segment LEDs explode. We used to be able to get them for a few pennies, now I'm lucky if I can get them for $0.16 (I think they start at $1.50-ish on Digikey).
I also noticed Digikey and Mouser are having a hard time having some stuff in stock. I'm often hit with the ZERO STOCK notice when I'm doing searches for parts. I cleaned out the last 16 MCP23016 that Mouser had on hand. I know we're supposed to switch to the MCP23017 (slightly cheaper), but I'm used to the MCP23016, and the PICs I'm using only go up to 400kHz at best, and even that comes with a disclaimer on the datasheet.
While the MCP23017 can run at 1.7MHz. The nice thing with the MCP23017, you don't need the capacitor/resistor combo to get the clock going. Oh crap, I wanted to order a few to start playing with them. Oh well...The I2C interface does not conform to the 400 kHz I2C specification (which applies to rates greater than
100 kHz) in all details, but may be used with care where higher rates are required by the application.
Robert
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