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As a newbie in electronics when building projects with Arduino, sensors etc. on PCB I often have a problem with electrical components like capacitor, resistor, diodes, switches etc. For different projects one needs different electrical components with different size. I am looking for something like a minimal set, or most-needed electrical component catalog/assortment for beginners (e.g. capacitor 1pF ~ 10uF, resistor 1 ohm ~ 10M ohm etc.) which I can order from eBay in larger amounts in advance in order not buy one-by-one with higher costs and waiting time.

Questions:

  1. What is the most needed electrical component catalog/assortment for beginners ( Capacitor, resistors etc)?
  2. What are the mostly used size of them (not sure e.g. for Capacitor maybe 1pF ~ 10uF)?

So, I need a list of electrical component catalog/assortment for beginners with most commonly used size/volumes (which I can order in advance).

JYelton
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m19v
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  • updated my post and added questions – m19v May 28 '20 at 23:26
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    Possibly duplicate of https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/966/which-electronics-components-should-i-always-have-on-hand/3122#3122 – Daniel V May 29 '20 at 00:07
  • there isnt a master list or minimum list. depends on what you are building and how many variations, etc. you look at the reference design, you look around at other folks open source designs, etc, get a feel for what parts you really need (and what designs are buggy and broken but somehow are popular or in production or whatever anyway). When you go to mouser/digikey to buy the big whatsit the mcu or sensor or whatever, caps and resistors are literally pennies, grab 20/100 even if you only need 5...of the values you need for that project. – old_timer May 29 '20 at 03:33

3 Answers3

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As a former beginner myself (and still a beginner in many ways) I could write this to-buy list:

  1. Resistors: 100 ohm, 1K, 4.7K, 10K, 22K, 47K, 100K, 1M.
  2. Capacitors: 10pF, 100pF, 1000pF, 0.01µF, 0.1µF, 1µF, 10µF, 100µF
  3. Schottky diodes: Single, common anode, common cathode
  4. N-Mosfet, P-Mosfet SOD-323
  5. Logic gates (AND, NAND etc)
  6. Schmitt Trigger
  7. Some indicator LED, red, green, blue
  8. Zener diodes: 3.3V, 5V, 12V
  9. Terminal connectors, headers male and female, single strand wires, glass fuse holder etc
  10. 3V and 5V voltage regulators (LDO and non LDO) (10pcs each)
  11. Rotary or sliding potentiometer 1K, 10K and 100K (10pcs each)
  12. Tact switch, DIP switch, slide switch.

Buy them by 100 or 200 pcs. Both SMD and THT.

Better buy electronic components from reputable vendors like Digikey or Mouser.
Terminal blocks and other hardware can be bought much cheaper anywhere else.

Fredled
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  • Nice. Can you (or somebody else) please complete (if possible) the list and add other components (such as transistors, inductors, voltage regulators, switches, buttons, rotary potentiometer etc.) This list would be very helpful for a new or complete beginner. Thanks – m19v May 29 '20 at 20:41
  • I'v added voltage regulator and some other thingds. Other things are too specific. It really depends on what you want to do. Inductors, Operation Amplifiers, Triacs, NPN Transistors, Power Mosfets, 555 clock, PIC microcontrollers are common components, but may be completely useless if it happens that you don't work on projects specifically requiring them. – Fredled May 29 '20 at 22:29
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This page is old, but still a great starting point: http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/199907/kevinro1.html

It's by a builder who lists his favorite parts (caps, resistors, connectors, etc), why he chose them, and places to buy quantities of them. Like the OP, he didn't want to buy little batches, or not have a good selection of parts on hand.

Their internal links appear broken, but type good search terms in their search bar and it will find those articles.

aMike
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    Answers with only links are destined to become less useful. Summarize what the link is about. – JYelton May 29 '20 at 00:11
  • Ah, yes, you are correct. And I've seen this comment many times in many places, so I should have known better. I've edited it. Thank you! – aMike May 29 '20 at 02:35
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Get some 2N3904, 2N3906 (PNP), and the book by Doug Self "Audio Power Amplifier Design".

His writings are one of the few that bring up the dynamic/transient heating effects in circuits.

The first mention of this I encountered in Walt Jung's discussion of picking the physical size ( the thermal mass ) of feedback resistors for audio power amplifiers. If these resistors change value (perhaps caused by bass notes), then the gain is changed for ALL the musical content, thus the bass energy is Amplitude_Modulating the rest of the music.

If you assume the physical volume of the resistor sets the thermal time constant, and assume any ceramic core is silicon, then a 1millimeter cube has 11.4 milliseconds time constant, a 2mm per side cube is 4X slower at 45milliSeconds, a 4mm per side cube is 16X slower at 180 milliSeconds, etc.

(These timings come from "thermal diffusivity" physical constants, which are the simple inverse of thermal time_constant, which are computed from specific_heat and thermal_conductivity.)

Thus you can use the resistor temperature coefficient (worse case) and presence of bass energy including wow and flutter and subsonic High Pass Filters, to design the up_conversion to AM sidebands.

Resistor size does matter.

analogsystemsrf
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