board games

A couple of weeks ago I placed an order with BatchPCB for the N64 RGB DAC board. Today I received two of them!

I’m quite excited to see the design all professional looking. If I’m really lucky they might even work!

As I understand it sometimes the fabs will make extras of a board in case something goes wrong. If they all come out fine then there’s not much to do with the extras, so they just chuck them in as a bonus. That’s good; now I have a spare if something goes wrong and I don’t feel like I got such a bad deal with the insane postage cost.

eBay is the best source of cheap components in bulk. There’s hundreds of stores all selling manner of things in huge quantities for mere pennies and half of the time with free shipping. This time around I’ve picked these up:

• 250x 1/4W 1% 560 ohm resistors
• 100x 0.01uF ceramic capacitors
• 10x 74HC04 hex inverter ICs
• 10x 74HC374 octal D-type flip-flop ICs

All for the bargain basement price of $22.50. Sure, I have to wait a couple of weeks, but I’m not in any hurry here. If I’d been really smart I would’ve ordered the parts a couple of weeks ago. Oh well :)