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Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

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Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#111

Post by tverbeure »

wildzzz wrote: post #79
myself248 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled that Mouser and Digi-Key haven't put the same effort into a Kicad pluggin to replicate that capability.

Digikey doesn't give a shit about interfacing with a hobbyist tool. There's no money in it. They'd much rather spend the resources on developing interfaces for their customers that spend 100-1000x more money with them.

Digikey has been pretty active on Twitter lately, targeting hobbyists. They're also a platinum level KiCAD sponsor. And they bought the kicad.org domain from a malware squatter and donated it to the KiCAD project.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#112

Post by ajb »

WalterBright wrote: post #19

When the cable guy came to add another outlet to my previous house, I watched what he did and chatted a bit about his tools. He was using Digikey tools. I then ordered identical tools. For my later house, I installed all the cables and outlets myself, with the Digikey tools. All I can say is two thumbs up for them. Quick and easy, and not a single bad connection. I did this because of my troubles soldering, which all…

This. It's even true of cleaning tools - get a mop from a consumer store and it's made of thin plastic and will break in a year or so. Get a professional one from a cleaning supplier and it will be indestructible - even though it's made by the same company.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#113

Post by fpgaminer »

fest wrote: post #92
konschubert wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best place to order form china?

lcsc.com. But keep in mind that their prices for Western companies ICs is often worse than DigiKey/Mouser. The passives and connectors are a lot cheaper.

I agree, the few times I've used LCSC it's been a perfectly fine experience.

But LCSC parametric search is worse, and their product photos and data are often wrong. Mouser/etc have decent parametric search which, for me, makes them the best place to find parts. LCSC has so much garbage data, a bad UI, multiple languages, etc. When I need a cheap, china specific part I usually just have to resort to manually searching through the 1,000 or so parts by hand. About as much fun as one imagines. And then their website starts throttling you for opening too many PDFs. SMH.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#114

Post by teraflop »

mason55 wrote: post #98
bee_rider wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, when I was randomly picking a parts website in school (electrical engineering), Digikey gave me much better vibes. I mean look at their websites! One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.

> One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts. 1. I'm not sure why you think UI and design are not engineering concepts. If people can't figure out how to use your product then it's useless. 2. These sites are almost exactly the sa…

If nothing else, Mouser has one enormous usability flaw (which has been an issue for years): you can't sort by price.

Or rather, they will let you sort by the "pricing" column, but the effect is to sort parts by their unit price at whatever the minimum quantity for that part is. But some parts are orderable in single quantities, and others only in large trays or reels.

Even if you manually filter out those packaging types, it can often be the case that part A is cheaper than part B at qty 1, but significantly more expensive at (say) qty 20. So you can't actually do price comparisons without paging through the entire list, which may be many hundreds or thousands of pages depending on what you're searching for..

Digikey does the much more sensible thing, which is to let you enter the quantity you actually want, and sort items by what their unit price would be if you order that quantity. Mouser has a similar box to enter the quantity, but it only affects the display of each row, and not the actual sort order.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#115

Post by fpgaminer »

JohnFen wrote: post #59
sschueller wrote: post #22

For small personal projects I have switched to LCSC in part because I can automate the BOM order when I generate the PCB gerbers all out of Kicad via gitlab pipeline. All I have to do is add the LCSC part numbers as an extra field in my Kicad schematic. If I order from JLCPCB I also get a shipping discount at LCSC. Mauser and digitkey are very expensive to ship here (Switzerland) so unless my order is larger it's not…

It may not affect the economics of your situation, but if you do projects on a regular basis, this might help. When I order parts for a project, my baseline rule is "order 3: one to break, one to use, one to kick around in your parts drawer for next time". Then I go back through my order and increase quantities of parts I know that I'll be needing again for future projects until the order total is high enough to qual…

That's a good pro-tip, but the real pros order 10 of something they think will be useful in the future, and then let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they die.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#116

Post by munificent »

crooked-v wrote: post #60
JohnFen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever since, I look at what the pros use and buy those tools. One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was to identify the core pieces of equipment that really impact the quality/efficiency of your work and go as high-end as you can afford on those. Then go as cheap as you can tolerate for everything else.

See also: Professional chefs with extremely expensive personal knife sets alongside basically disposable $8 tongs and $20 pans.

There are a also a lot of professional chefs rocking Victorinox Fibroxes which are quite cheap.

People like to fetishize knives, but for almost all uses, they really are pretty pedestrian and utilitarian. You don't need some $1,000 Japanese santoku forged from a meteorite to chop a bunch of veg well. You just need a comfortable grip and a little practice putting a good edge on the blade.

That being said, if nice knives bring you joy, then go for it. I have a couple of cooking knives that I like a lot.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#117

Post by stephen_g »

sschueller wrote: post #38
thrtythreeforty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the KiCAD userbase is still considered "small potatoes" and not worthy of this kind of development effort. Which is a shame if true. KiCAD is a gem of open source and holds a lot of mindshare with nerds and hackers.

Isn't Kicad the tool the CERN uses and also actively develops?

CERN is big enough that they probably use a bunch of different EDA tools. But yes, they do have people contributing KiCad.

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#118

Post by iancmceachern »

reaperman wrote: post #30
TylerE wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of like how in the mechanical world you just order from McMaster-Carr.

Yes, actually a lot like that, because in the mechanical world you'd order from either McMaster-Carr or Grainger. They're largely equivalent in broad strokes, no one would fault you for favoring one over the other. In 2015 that was the exact same situation for DigiKey and Mouser. Small differences, both have great selection, great service, competitive prices. This would be like either Grainger or McMaster-Carr just s…

For most design MEs I think Grainger is actually a red flag, in the same way digikey is to mcmaster, grainger, MSC, etc. are to Mouser etc.

It's of course different for ops, manufacturing and facility folks, thats mainly grainger, uline, MSC, etc.

For design McMaster, Digikey and Misumi are thr core go-to's

For ops and facility maintenance it's different

Re: Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics

#120

Post by fzliu »

bee_rider wrote: post #73
nebula8804 wrote: post #2

Wow I am going through the same thing as the author right now. I recently placed an order with Mouser doing side by side comparison shopping with Digi-Key. The last time I used Mouser was 12 years ago in my college days. I thought hey they were good back then let me just compare the prices and Mouser came ahead this time due to the shipping cost. I am just ordering replacement capacitors for an old PC motherboard tha…

It’s funny, when I was randomly picking a parts website in school (electrical engineering), Digikey gave me much better vibes. I mean look at their websites! One is clearly the result of getting a handful of hardware engineers in a room and telling them “we need to put our catalogue online!” The other looks like it has been infected by “UI” and “design” and other non-engineering concepts.

Not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Mouser and Digi-Key are nearly identical in terms of UI. Search functionality on top followed by products & manufacturers and a list of products on the left.

I'm with you on that second point though - both websites look like they were designed by hardware engineers rather than "omg-UI-UX-is-so-important" SWEs.

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