Do you use the parametric filters on electrical component sites?

Just a bit curious, does anyone use these advanced search filters often? I've noticed that Arrow really souped theirs up in their new beta site. I believe Newark, Allied and Mouser have these sort of robust filters as well.

Does anyone use them? Which do you think is the best?

Mouser and Digikey's Filters work well. Allied leaves a bit to be desired.

Write your own filters make a list of your own components that you want and suppliers plus websites Contact names You wont have to rely on theirs then will you or one single supplier because their data filters on various components happen to be better than others Consider price as well and incorporate that into your filtered application

If you can’t find what you want do it yourself thats what i always say

I don’t just pick a supplier based on name and Oh what fantastic website I pick a supplier because they can deliver what i want , at what price and on time , attitude towards the clients not because they happen to have fantastic database driven application running on their site

Yes it helps but its not the be all and all of anything You write your own database of suppliers etc and create your own filters of what you want and where from and whose best plus notes on how helpful , unhelpful they are

To be perfectly honest with you half the time I don’t even bother with them unless I have too

The world is that small now although large in choice you don’t actually have to go to them anymore You are spoilt for choice with the EU

Apart from which its a good exorcise to seek out other distributers who are just as competant if not more knowledgeable these some of these big companies are

Yup, use them -- mostly Mouser and Digi-key. One annoying quirk:

Different manufacturers use different ways of saying the same thing when specing their parts. Example: 250mw/0.25W/1/4W or 0.1uF/100nf or don't get me started about switches:

ON-(ON)
ON-MOM
ON-NONE-MOM
ON-NONE-MOMENTARY
ON-NONE-(ON)

And I've even seen:
ON - NONE- ON
ON - NONE -ON
ON - NONE - ON

WTF!!!


Because this madness is ported to the database (because the data entry people don't know the difference!), it makes selecting a subset (in a parametric filter) a bit of a pain, because you have to hunt down all of these variations (and make sure to think of all the possibilities).

MARK? This is your cue to go wild!

So, how do you acquire the information to put in your database? When do you find time to enter all that data? And how do you manage to keep up with changes (e.g. price changes, obsolescence, lead times, new versions/suppliers/lines, promotions)?

Same as you do with anything else steve by reading , researching , enquiring , negotiating and buying form different people from different companies, different countries something that you would do naturally one hopes when buying or purchasing goods keeping some type of stock record We hope put it that way

Of course if you were really clever then what you could do is query every website and filter the returned results on thier webpages and populate a database with those results Now thats a thought isnt it


Since most items now cary a website address on this its not that hard anymore is it to find out what suppliers and where

So you would write an application to query every webpage of your known suppliers open up a stream and reading that stream you would then remove all html tags leaving the results and then iterate through those results finding what price what type and stock

If you are anything like me what i do is when examining any equipment and any new equipment new technology I then on spotting some Ic’s which I may know nothing about is pick up a datasheet and find out who where and where from , what price


I also read plenty of those wastefull electronic magazines because youd be surprised at just how much you can pick up from the adverts and articles

That could be quite good couldnt it

Solution my friend use a bar code with description AND THEN WE AVOID DATA ENTRY PROBLEMS also we can use this as common naming convention system internationally accepted by all manufacturers which has part of a bar code assigned to components so that all types of components new or old are referred to by this part bar code , very similar to domain name system and IP addresses Now that would be clever wouldn’t it

Also for billing as well and stock entry even incorporated into your mobile phones these days is WOW a bar code scanner example the blackbury smart phone One wonders why the rest of the manufacturers havent followed in thier example

Fancy that Steve, not that anyone even bothered to think about this, I did though at the time I thought a brilliant captain marvelous idea

As one company put it to me when suggested this as a good method for bill entry instead of manually Yes you guessed " Not interested would rather have staff entering all data manually culminating in human error “ and lots of wasted time checking , re entering etc , "We dont want you thinking ", Ok whatever

Hmmmm I don’t know you tell me Steve

Yes I’m not techno phobic you know far from it

Yeah, that would be amazing!

Yes it helps but its not the be all and all of anything You write your own database of suppliers etc and create your own filters of what you want and where from and whose best plus notes on how helpful , unhelpful they are
To be perfectly honest with you half the time I don’t even bother with them unless I have too pcb.hqew
The world is that small now although large in choice you don’t actually have to go to them anymore You are spoilt for choice with the EU

FYI: it's "be all _end_ all"

I use the Digikey search filter almost every day.