It is particularly annoying for us engineering students to work hard on our projects and not have the kind of electronics we need for our projects. A particular chip or even a special capacitor can be a game changer for us. But, there is good news from our side as these benevolent companies give free electronics samples for us to use and review. They are also quite responsive and may ship within a night. So, engineers in the making, here are your ultimate saviours:
1. Push Buttons and Relays
2. General parts
LED Samples:
Free IC and Microcontroller Samples:
- Atmel
- Maxim – Good experience with them, samples arrived in about a week.
- MillMax
- Freescale – Quality experience, arrived in a few days.
- Cirrus Logic
- STMicro
Project Enclosures
Semiconductor samples
- Texas Instruments – Great service – Samples took about four days to arrive.
- National – Absolutely fantastic – they ship your samples overnight!
- Analog Devices
- Microchip
- Zilog
- System General
- Supertex
Just go to Global Spec and ask for a particular part. They will probably give a hundred more references and then you can ask each and every one of them for this purpose. But the list above has a reason. It is the collection of most reliable ones that send it on time. If you can’t find anything here, just go to eBay and get it at much lower prices than Radio Shack or Home Depot.