Part Search Engines – Find that part you need! The first part of designing electronics is specifying the components, but your job is not done there. Now you have to find someone to sell it to you! We have a few favorite distributors but as it is, sometimes they’re out of stock, or its much less expensive elsewhere. For this reason we use part search engines constantly sometimes 10 times a day!

In general, we use findchips.com and then back that up with octopart but whichever you use they’re pretty similar in functionality. We think that if you’re good with component naming conventions, findchips is a little more powerful – you can search and compare multiple packages/tempgrades. If you’re just starting and images help you out, octopart has that going for it.

If you’re looking for just some common parts, check out our partfinder as well, which has more of an ‘expert system’ approach…

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