Today’s mailbag is slightly out of order. I still haven’t caught up with all the mail I received over the last few months, but it feels wrong to keep the new shipments lying around for so long. I think I’ll just intersperse the pile of waiting mailbags with these newly arrived ones to keep things more current.
This is another mailbag from Tayda Electronics, one of my favorite cheap electronics companies from Thailand. The best thing about Tayda, besides their low prices, is their packing method. Each component type comes in its own labeled plastic bag. All of the smaller bags are combined in a larger plastic bag, and shipped in a padded envelope. My Tayda orders are a great source of spare bags and bubblewrap.
Tayda doesn’t seem to update their product catalog often. I can’t remember seeing anything new pop up since I started ordering from them. It didn’t take many orders to sample all of their interesting stuff, and I’m now just ordering parts I actually need.
This time I bought several 6x6mm tactile switches of different heights, including some right angle ones, to experiment with for my alarm clock project. I also included a metal 10k logarithmic potentiometer to more accurately control my audio amplifier, and a nice black plastic knob to go with it. I bought another silver stripboard to make sure I have plenty lying around for future projects. These boards are a joy to solder onto.
The stackable headers are meant for my Raspberry Pi B+. As shown in my previous post, the GPIO cutout in the top part of my Pi case doesn’t really fit the breakout cable I was already using. Adding these headers fixed the problem. The pins are long enough to fully insert them into the cable connector, with a snug fit that keeps the ribbon cable out of the case.
The one thing I didn’t realize was that two separate headers don’t quite fit next to each other on the same row of pins. I ended up having to skip one pin in each row. I’ll have to search around for two single-row 20-pin headers, or a double-row header to get full access to all 40 pins.
Update: I’ve replaced the separate 8 and 12-pin headers with a single 2×20 header, which fits perfectly and allows access to all pins.
After buying a few 8×8 dot matrix displays a while ago, I discovered the rows of pins at the top and bottom don’t quite line up with the columns on a regular breadboard. Instead of messing around with wires, cutting up a protoboard, or designing a custom PCB, these mini breadboards seemed like the best option to get the right amount of space in between the rows. I can’t wait to finally play around with these displays, and work on some animations.
Now that I can finally get my dot matrix displays hooked up, I’ll go into further detail on them in a future blog post. I might include the tasty super bright multi-colored 7-segment displays I have lying around as well.
Parts in this blog post:
- 8 pin stackable header – $0.15 – Tayda
- 12 pin stackable header – $0.22 – Tayda
- 94x53mm silver stripboard – $0.74 – Tayda
- 170 point white breadboard – $1.29 – Tayda
- 6x6x12.35mm right angle tactile switch – $0.13 – Tayda
- 6x6x7mm tactile switch – $0.04 – Tayda
- 6x6x13mm tactile switch – $0.07 – Tayda
- 10k logarithmic taper potentiometer – $1.47 – Tayda
- Davies 1510 clone black knob – $0.49 – Tayda
Pluxx's Magitech Golem Parts Emporium 
Gotta love Tayda! You have a really cool blog, and I enjoy the way you lay out your posts with the parts and prices at the bottom. I’ll have to check out that Banggood site you’ve mentioned in other posts.
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Thanks! Tayda is awesome for small parts, while Banggood has a greater selection of larger modules, Arduino clones, tools and accessories. ICStation seems to have some interesting stuff as well, but I haven’t had a chance to order anything from them yet.
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