I love parts express. They have the stuff to make yourself very high end speakers and a lot of very high quality amplifier and other electronics modules.
Or Fry's, which definitely does carry a lot of that sort of stuff (and also price-matches online prices, including Amazon's; I saved quite a bit on my Threadripper build thanks to that).
This might be slightly off topic but for harder to find parts you should check out Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale (it's close to Yahoo). The people are pretty friendly and it's generally just a fun place to go poke around.
Well, HSC is most certainly still around. Often cheaper than Digikey, with a great selection of jellybean components, as well as a really long tail of more obscure parts.
You may also want to checkout Digikey. It’s more focused on discreet components, but they have a huge catalog of electronics that’s worth searching through, and pretty reasonable shipping.
I just returned from 4 electronic shops on the weekend, in a major california city. I couldn't not find jumper cables and switches on the size that i needed, or plastic knob covers. let alone a good looking big metallic knob cover that i wanted. I finally found the jumper cables only at a frys, but for 7x the price i could have them online, shipped from china. But since i was in a hurry, I paid $20 for a broken stereo receiver at craigslist and removed the parts I needed.
For those of you in SF, you should look into Noisebridge. They don't have nearly as many tools or machines as TechShop, but they have a lot and it's all free.
SparkFun is awesome, but sometimes I need to have that electronic piece right away so I can finish my project this weekend. It would be awesome if there was enough of a market to have electronics parts stores in most cities.
Check out DirtyPCBs too. Based in Shenzhen but offers next-day DHL. Usually a 4 to 6 day turn-around time for me; great prices and good quality too.
If you're in a bigger city, also check out some smaller shops near you. There are a few nearby in the suburbs of Chicago for me and sometimes I go to them for quick turn-around time and a price that's higher than DirtyPCBs/Seeed's, but much closer than Advanced Circuits'.
I'm sorry to ask this, I am on a 5 minute break at work where was this that you got what sounds like an amazing deal? I would love to tinker around a bit.
Edit: I just clicked the link and realized that is the same place lol, yeah it is awesome.
reply