Digikey's accuracy and QC??

Maybe they just upgraded to Windows 7 :-)

Seriously, I've read that these days most of the stock picking is done robotically -- there might not have been a human "in the loop" until your parts were already in a sealed box ready to load onto a truck...

Not with Digikey but in some occasions we received empty leader tapes from Farnell.

On a sunny day (Wed, 12 May 2010 12:08:31 -0400) it happened Spehro Pefhany wrote in :

Whot you compain huh? It is LEAD FREE no?

Combining RoHS and RoNHS?

From time to time I think you will see this error. A few years ago, a TI charge pump I ordered (SOT23) didn't work. The package code didn't match. It must be a problem with the binning of incoming stock, which is most likely of human origin.

At least you got your moneys worth with the ferrite caps ;D

Cheers

I once ordered some green LED indicators, and received yellow instead, but the package had the green part number. I returned the yellow ones, pointing out that the wrong part must be in the right bin - got more yellow ones in return. A second attempt, following a discussion with our salesperson, finally got me the right colour.

Lately it has been getting worse.

This one was easy to spot. Now I am forced to open every package and check what is inside. For very small ICs that have no room for part number one has to cross reference the markings. This is a royal pita. What about unmarked caps? Do I check them on a bridge? How about being certain of dielectric material?

-- Boris

On a sunny day (Thu, 13 May 2010 13:28:32 -0400) it happened Boris Mohar wrote in :

Maybe them wwitches were used for the emergency cutoff of that oil well?

Don't i wish..need a good level sensor ("above" or "not above") for exactly that..

Too bad they didn't send you 10 of these by mistake: Link:

Not that B&K makes the best handheld spectrum analyzers, but at nearly $11,000 a pop, you could have made a handsome profit on eBay! :)

I recently ordered some camera gear from bhphoto. The box came with an extra item I did not order - a nice camera bag. Value, about $50 retail. I called them up to ask if they wanted it back but they just said I could keep it.

Nice that a company has enough brains in customer service to know that it's not worth the shipping costs, so why not make the best of it?

yeh remember a guy from work trying toget some special lamps of what ever it was, after the third try where they kept sending the wrong ones with but the right number on the pack he asked how many they had on stock and ordered them all, after they restocked he ordered the one he needed and returned the wrong ones :)

-Lasse

I have experienced worse from them;

I had this problem with bicolor LEDs.

I ordered a weird number, like 7 or so and two came in individual bags, and were ok.

skip forward maybe 2 years to a few weeks ago and I open the 5 pack and they're all orange/green, not red/green.

For parts with no marking at all, I can see how mixups happen. I'm still not sure if it was digikey or lite-on that mixed up the parts.

I'm sure that if I noticed the error 2 years ago, digikey would have fixed it instantly.

I did once find it was somewhat challenging to return items to them once- they weren't technically defective and weren't the wrong part which.

They did take them back in the end and things were good.

FWIW, linear power supplies from power-one are complete crap these days.

they actually stopped attaching the the power transistors to the giant aluminum heatsink in place of junior heatsink on a to-220 case on some models. I can't even figure out if that heatsink is cheaper than 3 through hole eyelets and just screwing the transistor down.

I was stunned to see that. Condor still does things the correct way.

They sent me the wrong parts some years ago. I called customer service and they sent the right ones by next-day UPS, credited the charge, and sent a pre-paid box to return the wrong ones.

days.

Big heavy old style linear power supplies that add to the entropy of the universe in a big way should be replaced with newer style switching types that are smaller, lighter and much more efficient.

for just testing stuff on the bench, nothing is as easy to less likely to cause troubles as a linear power supply.

They tend to have really low leakage as well, at least for the better made ones.

The overall product lineup for these products has shrunk over the years and I do wonder who even still uses them for production products. Most of the sales literature for them is hopeless outdated- for instance a manufacturer might claim a -5 +15 volt power supply is "good for disc drives" or something silly like that,

I do recall there used to be linears with voltage of 1.8 or 2.0 or something like that. I never figured out what they were even for.