Your Favorite Distributors?

Newark as a first choice, but that's primarily because most of their warehouses are close by, so I get next day delivery via UPS Ground. Prices are reasonable, generally cheaper than Digikey.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I was hoping for someone that I could get some applications info out of, by dangling the bait of high volumes.

Only value-added thing I've ever had them do was programming some crystal oscillators.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Some years ago, when I had just got to town and nobody knew me or anything, I had to buy some parts to build a run of prototypes. I checked out Newark's website, called Mouser, and so on. Mouser let me order and they trusted me to pay when I got the parts, and a Newark salesman called me and set up an account over the phone!

But that was in the good ol' days, when people trusted people, and every other person wasn't a thief, and so on.

Anyway, I'm a satisfied customer of Mouser and Newark.

Cheers! Rich

That's a tough one.... getting the truth out of a disty is a risky affair..... they want your order on their books so it looks good for their accounts. Getting the truth will involve establishing a long term relationship. Not easy in this day and age. I managed it with Active Electronics, Edmonton 15 yrs ago when I set up a manufacturing under licence deal from the UK for a Canadian Co.....

ns

I worked on a project with a programmable crystal oscillator on the digital board. It was used as a reference for a synthesizer that I was responsible for. The synthesizer was locking and working fine, but the in close phase noise was terrible. It really did not effect system performance, but I spent a few days trying to optimize the loop to get rid of the noise. The chip I was using had allowed some manipulation of the loop parameters and I kept trying to get the loop BW as wide as a I could while still having a smooth (non-ringing) response when making a frequency response. I finally gave up because the noise was not a problem in the system anyhow. A couple of weeks later the digital guy changed over to his new non-programmable crystals (he used the programable ones for the engineering phase) and my synthesizer looked clean as could be.

I can name my most un-favourite - the one I will never ever do business with again:

Farnell is quite good, if pricey. And Future Electronics have been a lot of help Mouser in the UK is crap, mainly because they stick a $25 P&P surcharge on every order

Don't think you will get much on these items from mainline distributors, especially on LCDs +/- touch screen.

Graphic LCD modules are a can of worms depending on your expected product life. You can get cheap riding on the back of high volume products but when those products become obsolete (which might be a matter of months) your supply dries up.

If your product is low volume and long life future availability will be the most important and restricting attribute for an LCD.

Actually I'm hooked into a consumer design, and can probably have a custom glass made -- if I knew who to talk to, and what to ask for.

Why is it so tough establishing a relationship with disties? We are fairly close with a number of them. Close enough for them to drop by every few weeks, sometimes even for lunch or even diner. ;-) Samples are *no* problem, though I generally buy them from DigiKey because they're faster. Orders on their books? Why? They'll get the credit down the line. All this assuming that it's a real business, of course.

Interesting. That's who we now do the bulk of our business with. They've been very good to us and have almost always have better prices than others.

We're running into exactly those problems now. One of the other guys just found a source who will make a custom display and backlight with only a $2500 NRE charge. Their per-unit cost is a *lot* less than we're currently paying, too, making the economic crossover point only a couple of months of production (the plan is for a OTB for production for a year or two). That is, of course, if there is nothing lost in the Chinglish translation of the proposal.

Interesting, thanks. I'm not too surprised--the cheapest way to get fine tunability is a synthesizer with a low comparison frequency. And tweaking a synth yourself is good for the soul. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My favorite disti is Arrow. I get along great with all of the sales people in our local Pittsburgh office. All of the FAEs are very knowledgeable and more than willing to help. Arrow has no problems getting us samples and small evaluation kits free of charge.

Custom monochrome (segment) displays are not expensive and NRE costs are reasonable.. assuming 5K or more per shipment, no problem. Price depends on area, quantity, terminations, fluid type etc.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

And their attitude here, if you are a contract designer and not a bulk buyer (that follows later), is "f*ck off".

Unlike Future Electronics

IMHO Linnix is into custom LCDs. Maybe he can chime in.

s,

Yes, we can certainly get it going. We did a 4"x3" (approx) VGA sized mono-LCD w/ resistive touch for around $5 each, but minimum of 10K glass. Controllers and other electronics can be less, but not the glass. BTW, no manufacturers or distributors stock them, even for standard sizes.