Ok, so I’m going through my box of parts looking for a driver. I have dozens of these little plastic bags with drivers, led’s, assorted parts. And I’ll be darned but I have no idea exactly what some of these things are. There’s the driver I’m looking for. Nope. I guess it was just some contact boards. Here is the driver I was looking for. Or is this the one with 350ma chips on it? What freakin low does this one have? You get the idea. So just what is everyone doing to organize this stuff so when you grab that driver or whatever, you know for sure what it is? :~
I’ve been looking up the number on the little bags if I know the source. That’s a real PITA. I think I’m going to have to start putting everything in those clear compartmentalized, boxes and add a paper note with the part info in that compartment.
For me it’s really simple, I manage to kill off any extra’s I have such that to do a new mod I have to order exactly what I want and wait for it.
EDIT:
Man, y’all are a tough crowd! I re-use the zip-lock baggies from parts I get, store them in the neat little boxes that Mouser ships in. Silly as it might sound, I use a rubber band around the box to indicate to me what it contains…whether the rubber band is on the far right, far left, or a position in between. Makes it easy for me to find drivers, TIR/reflectors, resistors/Zener diodes and the like. Another box may contain SinkPADs, LED’s, solder paste, solder masks and tweezers.
They stack nicely and so far this has worked. Getting enough boxes of extras I might have to re-figure the plan. I’ve made plenty of cabinets before, I don’t see why I couldn’t make a flashlight corner cabinet with pull out drawers and brass label holders for the front, maybe use some nice oak and stain it golden with a good coat of oil or tonque oil.
my hobby part drawer is so unorganized i am contemplating shipping & donating the whole drawer to old lumens for him to make sense of it and build stuff
i have no idea what 70% of the parts in my drawer are LOL.
Drivers, emitters and such I keep in small plastic zip-loc baggies of various sizes I bought off eBay. These are great and cheap. Get the ones with a white area for writing. I label the key parameters, brand and often where I got it and the SKU number.
Ace Hardware in the US sells small plastic drawer cabinets I keep a lot of stuff in. A labeler is handy.
Resistors - that's where I haven't figured out a good way to store and label. I keep them binned generally by value but I still haven't remembered the color codes, and some are hard to read anyway. Same with caps; a capacitance meter really helps. Electrolytics in one drawer, everything else in another.
Lets all make a google spreadsheet and sing the add ocd song we learned as children ..
"One of these things is not like the other one of these things just doesn't belong ....lets see if I can figure out which driver it is... before we finish this song ."
I have a bag lady come over and mark them all for me...
I use tiny plastic bags that I got from Hobby Lobby, for the LEDs and I use plastic cases (fishing section at Wal-Mart), for leds and most everything else.
I like the idea of having a bag lady mark all my bags for me. I finally found what I wanted and chucked everything back in the box as it was. Maybe I’ll deal with it next time. Kick the can down the road as they say. Heck, if it’s good enough for our government then it’s good enough for me!