exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I've goten to the point where I try to totally avoid anything sold from china that is not under the control of a US company with a reputation to protect. I used to buy "economical" devices such as eprom and pic's which also had a high percentatage of weird anomalies. Also my wife's dog was eating dog treats made in china and died. Month later they were recalled because of dog deaths and contaminates found. Shrimp sold here from china were recalled. It just goes on and on so now I totally make every effort to not buy anything from china. Why risk it. Not cheap when you don't get what you purchase.

I’ll buy sockets from China. That’s it

I have had pretty good success purchasing from China. I have built a few TF530's using parts purchased via aliexpress. Purchasing from China via Ebay has not been very successful. My 68030's have come via Alibaba but you have to buy bulk and haggle a bit to get a good price. Overall it does save money if you are doing a few projects, but I would definitely agree that the first build should use parts from Digikey, Mouser, or a reliable electronics house.

Apparently I have issues, I build a board and test it and then build another. Total sold 0, just enjoy the challenge and debugging I guess.

Great to see open projects like this, especially since I have been noticing other people pulling their designs down. I understand why, but still sad to see.

My success from China has been good, both AliExpress and UTSource.

Nothing I've had so far has been faulty (See deliberate exception below!), including GALs, Goteks, EPROMS & RAM (100x 41256 chips, all tested fine) and a ton of other stuff including my ROM burner, which has so far been reliable. I do go in with my eyes open though

I did an experiment a month ago with Amazon, and bought a couple of so called 256GB micro SD cards, the price was so low I pretty much knew they would be duff. I wasn't wrong and reported as such back to Amazon. I just don't know how they can allow crap like that to be sold under their banner.

Oh wait. It makes them money so Jeff Bezos can build another island with a spaceport and rockets.....

Well jon you can have my china allocation since I won't be using it. Three or four years ago I did have pretty good luck with there products but a couple years ago the percentage of crap took a big jump in my experience. A buy that stands out was a lot of 6309 and 6809's I purchased. Had a 50% fall out and it wasn't doa. Extreme heat sensitivity, would work for an hour and then stone cold brick. Would come back to life after an extended period of time. Just crap that I don't need to deal with just to save a some bucks.

In case you haven't noticed amazon sells a lot of Chinese crap. They have a huge secondary contingent selling stuff of which a lot are from china. Look at their prime stuff, its usually higher in price just enough to cover the "free" shipping. The only thing I do like about amazon is they do have reliable shipping here in the US. I do buy quite a bit of stuff from them because of the convince but I do avoid products made in china if at all possible.

PaulJ wrote: ↑Fri Jan 25, 2019 4:04 pm Well jon you can have my china allocation since I won't be using it. Three or four years ago I did have pretty good luck with there products but a couple years ago the percentage of crap took a big jump in my experience. A buy that stands out was a lot of 6309 and 6809's I purchased. Had a 50% fall out and it wasn't doa. Extreme heat sensitivity, would work for an hour and then stone cold brick. Would come back to life after an extended period of time. Just crap that I don't need to deal with just to save a some bucks.

In case you haven't noticed amazon sells a lot of Chinese crap. They have a huge secondary contingent selling stuff of which a lot are from china. Look at their prime stuff, its usually higher in price just enough to cover the "free" shipping. The only thing I do like about amazon is they do have reliable shipping here in the US. I do buy quite a bit of stuff from them because of the convince but I do avoid products made in china if at all possible.

That's ok I'll let you keep them 50% fallout is pretty bad. I guess it's variable, and I have probably just been lucky so far.

As for Amazon, I was doing an experiment, so not really surprised by the outcome. Would be nice if Amazon actually cracked down on these things, but I guess they are making money out of it too.

I'm giving up getting anything that's important from China, looks like the GALs I got a while back don't work, so will have to look for some ATF equivalents.

As TF, I do get my sockets there, as well as resistor packs but got my Xilinx stuff from farnell.

I stopping buying China sockets as well. In fact lately only buying the more expensive 3M ones from farnell.

Its like the round header pins I have been getting from china and the DIP64 CPU sockets, the pins don't fit in the sockets properly. So I brought a lot of branded CPU sockets and things are better but even the pins seem to have some "coating" on them which means I have to clean them all in IPA before soldering even as the solder doesn't always stick to the pins! madness.

I think the only thing I haven't had trouble with is the 20mm fuse holders I use on my PSU's.

I also seem to find a "trend" which China suppliers.. They seem to give you good service and deals on the first order, things generally seem ok.. Then the second order, they seem to send junk. It might just be coincidence, but that type of thing has happened a few times to me.

Overall prices seem to be ramping up lately as I mentioned before, but also stuff is getting harder to find, and the quality of items has hit a all time low.

As for people buying PLD's from china.. Its OK if they work of course, but if you do a batch of boards like I have done, and then you find half of them don't work.. its spending time fixing those boards, where the new PLD you solder on might also be duff. So then you whole day goes messing about with suspect PLD's. So its a toss-up between what you save on the parts price, vs all the fixing of faulty boards as well. If all the boards work then great, but it never lasts so I have seen with stuff.

I'd just rather pay more for decent parts and avoid all the troubles further down the road. I find that more cost effective then buying 100's of cheap parts then having to junk half the boards later.

I also got some ATF16V8 and ATF22V10 gals from Digikey a few years ago, but I couldn't find a single programmer that would program them, and the official Atmel programmer was crazy expensive.

What are you using to program these?

alenppc wrote: ↑Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:59 pm I also got some ATF16V8 and ATF22V10 gals from Digikey a few years ago, but I couldn't find a single programmer that would program them, and the official Atmel programmer was crazy expensive.

What are you using to program these?

I been using a TOP3000 programmer for years, but they don't properly support a ATF22V10.. So I brought a TL866 programmer, which seems to be what most go for these days.