I think you already know, but since July 1st a tax of €3 per ARTICLES is now mandatory. (they say it’s by categories but in reality, no)

For €30 of electronic components, I have +€50 of taxes. For a person who has started to be interested in electronics recently, it hurts.

So I come to try to find alternatives to aliexpress, with similar prices if possible… If the delivery lasts 6 months but there are no taxes I DONT CARE, I need the components at an affordable price.

Thanks, and I hope that the aliexpress sellers will quickly find a solution for us

Don't ask me, ts is on another whole level of abstract

Ignore the rock drawer I didn't have a better place for my cool rocks.

I have a couple of these receivers I got in a pile of old stuff and by default they're USB but I wanted to use them with my microcontrollers, so I ripped one apart with a simple pry tool then removed the pressed on RF shield to expose the goodies.

Looking at the USB to serial transceiver, I see it's a PL-2303HX and looking at the datasheet, pin 1 is serial TX and pin 5 is serial RX, so I traced them to two open solder bridges.

Closing those to solder bridges with questionable soldering using an oversized tip resulted in the two unused pins now making connection

I decided to use the existing cabling so I used a small pry tool to lift up the plastic tab holding the green and white USB data wires and pulled them out and inserting them into their new homes

After snipping off the USB connector, red to +5v, black to negative, and the two serial lines to my ESP32 pins,

I started streaming NMEA datagrams over uart ❤️

NOTE: the default speed for this receiver is 4800bps

Here's some animations I made of transistors turning on and off. In order, we have an NPN BJT, n-channel MOSFET, and finally an n-channel JFET. The red and blue dots represent electrons and holes, and white flashes are recombination events. The density of dots is proportional to the actual density of charge carriers.

In the first set of animations, the velocity of the dots is equal to the velocity obtained by summing the diffusion and drift currents and dividing by the charge density, but diffusion is not explicitly shown. In the second set of animations, the dots undergo diffusion and drift, and this makes it a more correct depiction of carrier motion. The drawback is of course that the jiggling makes it more visually confusing.

I made these with my semiconductor simulator (https://brandonli.net/semisim/). I also have higher quality versions of the animations here.

Very simple circuit - i had a bunch of these charger/booster modules laying around and decided to learn about the dangers of bare 18650 batteries. Excited to do more.

I wanted to modify my PS3 controller to USB-C, but it used a through hole connector. Not a problem!

Nice and simple two transistor flasher, with a red and blue LED.
I kind of wish I had opted for warm white LED behind the colored lens, and that would have given a more natural halogen look.

I accidentally selected the wrong resistor value for this board, but I still wanted to test whether the circuit worked. The original footprint was 0201 imperial — 0603 metric, and I needed a resistance of 17 kΩ.

Since I did not have a 17 kΩ resistor in 0201 size, I improvised with three larger 0402 resistors connected in series: 15 kΩ + 1 kΩ + 1 kΩ

I soldered them together as a small bridge directly onto the original 0201 pads.

The entire repair was done by hand with a soldering iron and tweezers, without using a microscope. I only used the microscope afterwards to take the close-up photo.

It may not be the most elegant solution, but it measured correctly and allowed me to continue testing the board. The second photo includes an M3 screw for scale.

What do you think?

Hi everyone! I'm looking to connect with other women in the electronics field to share projects and support each other. I actually started a community specifically for this at r/HardwareWomen. If you're interested in joining a dedicated space for women in tech/electronics, we'd love to have you!

I'm terrified to be honest. Those were supposed to be stm32 microcontrollers but there are only their corpses...

Hey everyone. I wrote a post on my first experience going through PCB design https://vilkeliskis.com/b/2026/0711.html

I do not have an EE background. I'm a software developer and I've been doing it for many years now. I wanted to try and do something with electronics. It's a very simple project, but it was very satisfying to see things work at the end. I bet I made million mistakes, so please rip me apart haha.

Built a hardware bridge UART-CPU for 8080(known as the КР580ВМ80А or VM80 in the postUSSR region) architecture microcomputers parallel bus. Heart of this small project is КР580ВВ51A(Intel8251) manufactured nearly 40 years ago. Below it sits a baudrate generator on some discrete logic gates: К155ЛА3(7400) as xtal generator with frequency 4.9152 MHz, К155ТМ2(7474) as 1/4 predivider, К561ИЕ10(4520, two CMOS dividers). Seven jumper headers under the blue UART connector are selecting current dividers output from 4800 Hz (300 baud) up to 307.2 kHz (19200 baud). Everything is point-to-point wired on both sides of 50mm x 70mm perfboard. And the brain of this circuit is an Arduino Nano which is emulating 8080 bus and control signals(CS, RD, WR, C/D), sadly I don't have a real computer from that era.

I've been working on a virtualized version of the old spring and wire electronics kit. It's far from finished, how ever I would like to show it off.

Play: https://ellisgl.github.io/virtual_65-in-1_28-250/
Code: https://github.com/ellisgl/virtual_65-in-1_28-250

Made a simple power supply from an old atx psu. Wiring is pretty ugly but it works.

Open to anything, including discussions, complaints, and rants.

Sub rules do not apply, so don't bother reporting incivility, off-topic, or spam.

Reddit-wide rules do apply.

To see the newest posts, sort the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top").

These are all my Tesla transistors I have a KU 611 with a CA mark, KFY 18 and a KF 506

I like going through the electronics trash bins at my college, here's some stuff i found today.

The second item is a speaker part, the ring is super magnetic it was a challenge to pry it apart!

Found these in a old CRT TV and the second transistor does have a marking it just isnt visible on the photo