An easy way to locate hard-to-find electronic parts online

An easy way to locate hard-to-find electronic parts online

Doing the research shouldn’t be such a battle

BY JEFFREY BAUSCH

The problem with electronic components is that they become dated so quickly. The parts you use today will, in all likelihood, be deemed obsolete six months down the road. This can be incredibly frustrating when you want to update a design or product, but not incorporate new electronic components for reasons of cost, incompatibility issues, et cetera.

Searching for hard-to-find electronic parts can be a bit of a headache.

Why do electronic parts not last?

The reason why electronic parts become obsolete so quickly stems from the general thinking that today’s electronic gadgets can always be better, faster, and longer lasting. After all, who wants any regular ‘ol iPhone when you could have one with Siri built in it? Why watch MythBusters on a 30-in. LCD TV when you could be enjoying it on a 50-in. OLED instead?

Technology innovations are made on a near-daily basis, but the breakthrough electronic components that power them today will most certainly be obsolete by year’s end. The constant flux in this market is great for today’s impatient consumer, but it can be very frustrating for the engineer.

What’s an electrical engineer to do if an obsolete part works best?

Let’s say you’re assigned a job to update a design, fix a product, whatever the case may be, but the pieces that you used in the past (like, just last year “in the past” ) are now considered out of date. We’ve all been faced with this scenario before, and know that updating to a new and improved electronic component is a headache on two-fronts: first, you need to familiarize yourself with how the new part functions and how it’ll affect the rest of the design; second, you need to pay an astronomical price for all of the component’s “new-and-improved” features.

So, given these options, you decide to forego the new part (for now at least) and try and find the old electronic component on the web instead. You go to Google, type in a description of what you need, and what do you get? A smorgasbord of surplus electronic component and obsolete electronic part websites to choose from.

Not making things any easier is the fact that each website description company claims to have a more thorough selection, cheaper prices, and faster shipping than all the others.

This all but forces you to compare the different websites and make a list of who has which parts at what price. Before you know it, the hours you planned on using to labor on the project have now been turned into filtering the web results for the best sites to place your order for an old electronic component.

Are you getting that whole “banging your head against a brick wall feeling” yet?

The solution

Believe it or not, there are a few sites out there that do a really good job at organizing electronic parts by item number, description, and.

A good example of a site that can help you locate hard to find electronic parts is ICMaster.com. Its simple design interface allows you to quickly click through a list of selections to find the exact electronic component needed.

There’s also a unique and incredibly useful search bar, which includes several different search options to help you locate your hard to find electronic product either by part number, manufacturer, product name; you can even type in a description of what you need here and get a list of parts to choose from.

A brief description is all that’s needed to locate hard-to-find electronic components.

What’s more, you can compare different electronic parts, no matter how obsolete or new they might be, download data sheets, check to see if the electronic component is in stock, and more.

The thinking is pretty simple with a site like ICMaster.com: remove the time consuming part of searching the entire internet for obsolete electronic parts, so that engineers can get off the web and back to their projects.

Conclusion

The list of electronic part websites will only get longer. When you find a site like ICMaster.com, bookmark it. They place greater value on an engineer’s time, as opposed to how much they’re going to spend with them. ■