Up until now for every project I have ordered all the parts needed for that project and kept all the left over parts in a Digikey box under my desk. This made it near impossible to find any parts if I ever needed them again since I had to sort through an unorganized box for a certain part. So one weekend I decided to try to organize my parts so that I could easily find parts that I have used before so I can reuse them on new projects.
There are many different ways to organized electronic parts; these component storage drawers are very popular but I don’t have a very big desk so I wanted something more compact and easier to search through since I don’t want to catalog my parts at this point.
I found these business card holder binders that I through would work great for holding components. I have seen similar ones specifically for SMT resistors and capacitors but I also wanted to store SMT ICs and through hole resistors and the business card sized pockets seemed great for that.
I bought a few from Staples and spent a weekend going through all my miscellaneous parts boxes and came up with this:
I have one for through hole resistors and capacitors, SMT passive parts (capacitors, resistors, inductors) and one for all my SMT semiconductors. One day I will probably need to put together an inventory database but this seems like a good start.
Andrew