Keeping organised: electronic components

Background

As you all know, I received an Arduino Starter Kit for Christmas, I gave a quick un-boxing guide here. 

The Electronic Components box in the kit contains, quite shockingly, all your electronic components, such as resistors, potentiometers, switches, LEDs. You do get quite a good selection, a very good selection if I'm completely honest! And they all come in this nice neat anti-static bag. 

Herein is the issue.

All these components with tiny and some not-so tiny legs all in one bag, and you are after one in particular ... What can possibly go wrong?

Well I'm an organisation / planning freak so I like everything neat and organised and to know where they are. If you are in a professional workshop and producing hundreds of boards, you probably have your bench with lots of these :

The one above is quite a small one, you can get these with over 100 drawers in. And they are the perfect width for having the tapes that resistors come on in without breaking them out. Ideal!

However for those of us whom are just starting in electronics these are both a) big and bulky b) more than you need c) can be very expensive!

So something else is needed ...

The Solution!

I was having a wander around B&Q in the post-Christmas sales, I was after some mirror mounting pieces, but whilst comparing the prices to both Homebase down the road and Amazon, I found (thinking back I really should have known this .... ah young, first-home-owner, lessons learned) that B&Q was a rip off!

So whilst walking to the door I just happened to spot piles of Really Useful Boxes. Now I've used these for nearly 10 years. I first encountered them when I was getting ready for university. My mum bought me a load (being a teenager I never noticed prices, especially when others were paying - it was her choice she suggested them!) and as such they were used to move me in, out and up and down the country for years. Having bought my first home in April 2013, it is only today I noticed that one of them (of about 15 I own!) has a crack in the corner - no where near bad enough to warrant it being binned, still massively useful, in fact its role hasn't even changed because of the crack!

So after all these years they have stood up to a lot of abuse and I can definitely vouch for them, yes they are expensive, but these will out last the contents! Anyway I digress

So I spotted the big ones and told the other half about them, she winced when she saw the prices! But then I spotted a palette of the tiny little ones that you use on your desk. There's no way I would buy them because really how useful would they be? To me, I doubt I'd use them, but then I saw a multipack like this :

All for £7. Thinking "pah, rip-off B&Q, let's see what my dear friend Google has to say" ... a few swishes on the smart phone later I was pleasantly shocked to see that Google says that B&Q was the cheapest! So I bought said pack!

Coming home I wanted to get on with organising all my components in my organisation freaky way.... I have to admit, I was slightly elated when I got home to do this, so on the sofa I went and poured out the components from the anti-static bag and started sorted into each tub. Each tub contained its own type of component. For instance one held switches, but also the potentiometers and the tilt switch. Another held all the LEDs, another had all the resistors (in an ideal world I'd like a box for each value of resistor!)

In the end, this is my newly organised array of boxed components :

So everything in its place, but where is it's place? Well to take things one step further I dug out the Sharpie marker pen and started labelling up the boxes fortunately, only one of the "fronts" of each box has the embossed Really Useful Box logo, so flipping them around I could start to label up each box with its contents as you can see below.

The very top row, which I've not marked up contains the jumper wires provided in the set, each box contains it's own size of wire from smallest to largest.

I hope that has been interesting. Let me know what you think and how you keep your bits, (electronics! wait that doesn't necessarily remove the innuendo ... ) organised.

Ciao for now!