Embedded - 360: Cats Love It!

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Ben Hest of Digikey (@digikey) answered questions about finding parts, warehouses, packaging orders, and sweeping components off the floor. The Digikey website: digikey.com. It is ok to click around, looking for a ton of information (as well as parts).  Want to see someone search for parts? Limor at Adafruit does this every week in The Great Search videos! Ben’s favorite new parts are the Raspberry Pi Pico and the Parallax Propeller 2. Embedded T-shirts are available! You could also have your own waffle paper maker: Geami Wrap. Digikey is hiring for IT and Software Engineering positions! Check out their open jobs here.

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White, alongside Christopher White. Have you ever been to an Arabian bazaar filled with wonders and magic lamps? Me neither. This week we're going to talk to Ben Hest, who works at Digi-Key. Before we do that, I want to let you know that we are selling t-shirts. It's going to go through the whole month of February. So check out the website and find the link there. Hey, Ben, how's it going? Hello. Could you tell us about yourself

as though we met at a hacker conference? Well, for the first 10 years of my career, I worked as an applications engineer at DigiKey. But for the past two years, I've been in a group called Customer Insights. I work across the business to try to give focus to the needs of electrical engineers, makers, technicians, basically anybody who specifies

or handles parts. That includes working with teams to improve the website, prototype new concepts, and really just trying to improve the experience for customers anytime, anywhere. Cool. Were you a DigiKey user before you started working there? Yeah, I started at DigiKey right out of school.

So I went to a school, North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota, and we used the DigiKey catalog to select parts, the DigiKey website, whatever. So yeah, I was a user before I started at DigiKey website, whatever. So yeah, I was a user before I started DigiKey. Okay, I am skipping lightning round because when we asked people if they had questions for DigiKey, we got a lot. And in fact, the whole show probably will just be mostly listener questions. We're just abdicating our responsibility entirely? Heck yeah. Well, but first we probably should define DigiKey. Well, how would you explain it to somebody if you

sat next to them on an airplane? You know, somebody you don't know at all and don't have an expectation of electronics background. But not me, because if I'm on an airplane, I'm screaming. And so I won't listen to what you're saying. Yeah. So I've done that many times on airplanes as I traveled to work. So DigiKey is, you know, everybody kind of has their own pitch, but DigiKey is a place that sells electronic components. But, you know, most people think of things like stereos or microwaves or TVs or, you know, any kind of consumer electronics, we actually sell the little bits that go into all of those things. So things like toasters,

even toasters have ICs today. And, you know, we even carry toaster ICs that literally have the bagel pin do it's for toasting bagels well is it like a logic input and then you set it higher does it is it an output no you push the button for bagel if you have a toaster that has a bagel button okay okay i'm all right now when i write digit key it tends to be one word and a lowercase except for the first D. Do you use the dash and the capital K? Yeah, that's kind of the official way we write it all the time. It comes from the namesake of the original product that kind of started the company called the DigiKeyer kit. Okay, what was in that?

That was a kit designed by our founder, Ron Stordahl, who still owns DigiKey and still shows up in the office, at least pre-COVID he did. Back in the 70s, he built this kit for the ham radio market, the digital electronic keyer. That item sold, but it wasn't exactly going to take over the world. It wasn't the next billion dollar product. This is key for Morse code keys. Yeah, Morse code. And since it wasn't particularly easy to get your hands on small quantities of components back then, our founder ended up buying larger quantities and selling the surplus from building his product in the back of electronics magazines and stuff like that. So it turns out that was a lot bigger of a need in the

electronics market. And the business kind of grew from a half-page magazine into a full-page mailer and eventually a full-blown 3,000-page, 3-inch-thick catalog that kind of propped up monitors everywhere. That's amazing. What was his day job when he was doing it? I mean, because the whole DigiKey ham doesn't sound like a product he was a a phd ee student and stuff back in those times and i'm not i'm not sure exactly where he made that transition but um yeah god i probably saw that when my dad was into ham radio in the early 80s and stuff that's amazing um it reminds me of stories of like amazon sort of and e, where both companies started as something that they didn't intend to turn into. They started as completely different from what they turned into.

That's cool. Okay, so now the lightning round like questions from our listening audience. What is the oddest part DigiKey stocks? Please say an elephant. Please say an elephant. Please say an elephant. I mean, we sell welding helmets and these gigantic brass sledgehammers that I'm not even... What are the sledgehammers for? We sell them, I guess.

Haven't you ever used a gigantic brass sledgehammer on your hardware? Or haven't you ever wanted to? I've wanted to. I don't think I have, no. I suspect that's probably a good use for that. Do you personally have a favorite component? I have a weird component

I like. It's a current limiting diode. Even if it has a namesake of diode, I, it's not really a diode, but it's this neat little thing you can put in series with, uh, LEDs and,

and other things. It's, it's a two pin device that limits current, but also lets you put kind of a wide voltage range on the outside of it. It's a weird, a lot of people don't know about it and I don't honestly know where it's used. I just have this neat infatuation with it. Do you get free parts for working there as an employee? Yeah, if it's work related and things like that, we can definitely ask for parts, pull parts, get parts in our possession and use them. And there's usually a project or some other fun thing involved with that.

We also get employee discounts if we're looking towards personal projects. But yeah. Do you know what the most expensive part at DigiKey is? I had to look this one up. The most expensive part DigiKey stocks is a KUKA robotic arm. And so there is more expensive parts in our catalog. And they're usually like gigantic presses from companies like Molex for making connectors and other things like that. But, yeah.

What's the least expensive part? There's a lot of least expensive parts. And it's mostly, I mean, just take your pick with the passives because that's really where the least expensive parts lie. You know, they can get down to thousands of a penny or something like that. They can get really, really cheap. Can I buy just one at a thousandth of a penny? How do I pay you a thousandth of a penny? Well, that's if only if you're buying in large.

But yeah, you can buy one. That's kind of Digikey's business model. You can buy one of anything. How big is the so this is not a just-in-time kind of dropship sort of operation right there's a big warehouse yeah yeah so our warehouse as it stands

in Thief River Falls is about I don't know 600 700 thousand square feet and then we are in the middle of building a brand new distribution center that's about 2.2 million square feet. Okay. In football fields, what is that? You go real quick. It's big.

It's very big. I mean, yeah, it seems seems big but i don't i i've never walked square feet football field is uh 57 000 square feet okay so 6.6 million divided by 2 million two point the other one 600 000 okay so it's like 10 12 football fields for one and a lot more for the other 30 something for the other yeah it it's it's definitely a big space i've taken a tour of it once and it's it's a it's a monstrosity uh it's kind of awe-inspiring you know to just look in there and see everything that goes on and is it automated? Like are there robots that go and do part picking or are there people going around

climbing ladders and stuff? It's surprisingly not all that automated. I mean, we have a ton of industrial automation kind of stuff in terms of conveyors and moving packages around. But if you're talking about picking parts, it's a lot of people just walking up to a shelf, grabbing parts, putting in a bag and putting it on a conveyor to take it away.

It's thousands of people just doing day after day, every day. So you said you took a tour, which probably means you can't just wander the warehouse whenever you feel like it. Well, I took a tour which probably means you can't just wander the warehouse whenever you feel like it well i took a tour of the new warehouse the the old warehouse we we basically have to go through it to go to meeting rooms and other things like that and i sometimes take the long route just to admire you know and discover new things you can just kind of walk up and down the rows or look at shelving and and it the diversity of product, you know, is just amazing. Is it like the last scene in Indiana Jones where there's just a field?

Is the Ark of the Covenant in your warehouse? Yes, actually, that's the correct question. I suspect not, though, you know, you never know. And do I get a quantity discount? For Arcs of the Covenant? What is the minimum order quantity? Right. 4,000.

Would you like a reel of that? Yeah, right. But yeah, it's pretty amazing. It's shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves with boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff and then people, tons of people all over the place. I have to believe that at some point, some pieces fall on the ground. How do you find the small ones? I mean, do you have a special vacuum cleaner that's like electronic components? I don't think there's an esd safe roomba um it's like a hard problem yeah yeah um but yeah stuff gets dropped it's it's not overly common or you know overly remote the you know chances that it happens but it gets swept up It gets thrown away and disposed of appropriately. It doesn't go back on the shelf because we have lots of ESD protocols

and other things that we have lots of sensitive parts that just can't be handled inappropriately at any time. You know, there are people who would probably buy grab bags of Digi-Key floor sweepings. I don't know. Don't you think so? It depends on what's in it. I would buy one. Mostly hair and a 6502 that got lost in 1979.

This is a weird question, but Thief falls is in minnesota right right so does does does the weather and winter conditions in in minnesota make it more difficult to do est protection uh yeah so i mean it's humidity controlled and stuff like that uh but i mean there's limits to your ability to control like large, large spaces. So there's everybody in there wears heel straps and for sensitive stuff, they're wearing wrist straps when they're picking and things like that.

Everything goes in. If it's moisture sensitive, it goes into heat sealed moisture sensitive bags. Yeah, there's a lot of logistics to really picking parts and making sure they stay safe and then getting to the customer safely. It's funny because logistics and operations lately has been more in the news than ever with the COVID vaccines. How do you get good at that?

I mean, it's a hard problem that people are like, oh, well, I'll just send one or two. But when you get to the scale of something like Dejiki, are there specialists who think about the ordering of parts or how many people you need to get how many parts out? Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have data scientists. We have people who have been in this industry and other industries.

We just have a wide variety. Logistics is not trivial at all. At the scale we're kind of working at, being in Thief River Falls, we are in a remote location. And we rely heavily on UPS, FedEx, the other carriers, to the point where they fly planes into Thief River each and every day, dedicated just to Digache. They've even gone to the point of converting smaller planes into cargo planes like CRJ-200s, you know, because our runway isn't quite long enough for their normal, normal large planes. How late can you drop things off for UPS? I mean, what is your ship cutoff time? Our ship cutoff time is 8 p.m. Central. And then people are busily, busily working until, you know, somewhere between 10 and 11.

And that's kind of the major cutoff for getting direct stuff going right to Louisville or the other hubs. Do you have to sort where things are going or do you just drop it all at UPS? So we actually have a UPS and FedEx and other carrier operations like right inside our building. Of course. So we do have large package sorters and stuff like that that kind of help pre-sort that stuff. But yeah, they're sitting right there scanning stuff in and putting them on their trucks. As an order comes in, it shows up at a pick station. A person walks right to the bin on the shelf. The person counts out the right quantity. The order is packed and it's thrown in a conveyor. For simple orders, it can be on a UPS truck for 15 minutes after someone submits

their order. So it goes through the warehouse really fast. And okay, so what do the robots do? If they're not picking things, what is the automation used for? You know, kind of like I said before, it's the automation. There's not really a lot of what you would consider traditional robotics. There is some really innovative conveyoring systems. What about counting tape? I mean, if I order a Digireel, how do you give me 1,000 versus 1,003?

That's a good question. There's a few ways to do that. I mean, the fastest way is actually just having a piece of paper or ruler type thing that shows the pitch of a part and how many parts come in that length. And they just set it down on the ruler and they cut it right at that spot. Yeah. The one interesting thing about that is that parts are only registered to the holes on a piece of tape. So tape can actually be different in length in terms of how long any given... How do I explain that? Well, I mean, some parts are short and some parts are long,

so you can't assume that there are 10 parts per meter. That's a really big chip. That's a big chip. 100 parts per meter. Yeah, the big thing is even with the same part and the same kind of tape, if you measure out a length of parts, there's actually a tolerance of how many parts are in a given length of parts. So if you aren't careful, the tolerance stack up across long lengths can kind of impact that. So, I mean, we have some internal stuff that we've created to help us verify, but overall it's just a really manual process for the most part.

I kind of thought there'd be scales. Like you'd weigh things, but I guess the tape... Give me six ounces of STM32 M4Fs. Yeah, I mean, there definitely are scales. There are scales for weighing out things that come in bulk, you connectors uh pins all kinds of other stuff will will come just in loose bags and basically pull it out and put on the scale now you got me thinking of the

grocery store cereal dispensers nuts you just put a bag up and yeah you look at a little pin those things are pretty uh microscopic they weights are pretty low, and so the scales are super-duper sensitive, and they even have scales with plexiglass covers on them so the air ventilation doesn't perturb the measurement. Yeah, it's kind of sad when you sneeze and all of the parts go everywhere. Have you ever seen an 01, 005 part? No, of course not. My eyes aren't that good. Is it difficult to deal with different sizes of orders? Like, I never buy more than about 10 of anything because I'm building stuff for myself.

And once it's going off to get built-built, somebody else does the procurement. But then I know Digi-Key has to work with that person, too, where they're ordering hundreds of thousands of things. It's hard to optimize if you've got such a wide dynamic range of order sizes. Yeah, and I mean, that's kind of what we specialize on, though. The entire warehouse is built and the processes are built to be able to pick small orders. You know, kind of the history of how we started, we came up from breaking down parts from full-size reels and then offering full-size reels, full-size trays, you know, full-size reels, full-size trays, full-size product, that's not nearly as challenging. It's just the space and size and getting things in a box. When is DigiKey going to become a fab so I can just send a visual design and have you send me the chip? Well, I don't know about that one.

Actually, we did have a question related to that, and that's how can i drop ship kits oh uh drop shipping i don't know if i could answer that so specifically um but i mean there are go ahead i don't really understand the question so i was hoping elisa would explain to me what she means okay say i i am getting a board built and I need a processor, a power regulator, a bunch of stuff. I need 15 parts to get this board built. Okay. Now I can order from DigiKey, get them all to here, make sure they're all in boxes and put them together, and then I send them to the assemblers.

Right. So you need to ship to the CM. Okay. So why can't i just ship to the cm got it got it got it oh yeah i mean there's definitely mechanisms to do that and i think that's something that you know sales can kind of help you set up where you're going to ship parts and where you're going to order parts so all right so i just need to talk to someone instead of poking for the right button right yeah yeah i i think uh you know there's there might be a way on the website to you know i mean you can fill out uh shipping addresses and things like that uh to drop ship i'm not sure if that's really the question that was being asked though so um i have to find the question because it was an interesting one. How would you have taken that question?

I was interpreting that question as if somebody wants to build a kit and then let other people order it or send it somewhere else. That's kind of how I would have expected that.

Yeah, I know SparkFun has, I can make a list and people can buy everything on the list. Did you have something like that? Yeah, we have lots of different kind of ways to manage lists. The big one is like the bond manager. The bond manager allows you to kind of collate all the information you need, add some notes to line items and put it in for a quote or, you know, a full on, just pop it in your cart and make an order. You can also save carts and share carts and all kinds of other ways of doing that kind of thing.

How much and what kind of support does DigiKey have for commercial designers versus hobbyists? It sounds like you started kind of with the hobbyist market, but now it's the commercial professional designer who is more often a customer or even the bigger companies. I guess the original question was engineering support for the two different paths. What kind do you have? Well, I mean, if somebody has a legitimate good question, we help anybody that comes in. You know, if they need technical support, if they need to understand how something works, we have a technical team. There's a variety of ways you can kind of contact us, email or chat. The newer one is we have something called the Tech Forum.

And so people can go on there and ask their questions and get them answered, and they get a lot of eyes on it. And it's pretty much patrolled from our side all the time. So we're pretty responsive, and a lot of questions get answered there. And it's pretty much patrolled from our side all the time. So we're pretty responsive and a lot of questions get answered there. Some people have complained about your packaging. Some people love it because nothing ever gets broken, but it can be a bit over the top. Are you thinking about doing anything to make it more environmentally friendly? Yeah, I think the teams who are in those logistical areas are

constantly trying to optimize and figure out how to reduce waste and get more environmentally friendly. I mean, one of the big things we did, as long as I've been here, we've always offered this weird little paper packing material

to fill inside boxes. It's called Jiami paper or whatever. It's kind of like this waffly... It's kind of hard to describe. Cats love it, though. Just ask Twitter. Cats love the combination of Jiami paper and

our boxes. And that's friendlier than plastic or peanuts. Peanuts. Oh, I missed one of the good short questions. How many things does DigiKey have in your warehouse, counting individual components on rolls? What? Is it a billion?

10 billion? Within what error? I don't know. I just wanted the total. What precision are you asking here? We do have an inventory management system, but I mean, it would be on the upper end of the orders of magnitude you were saying. What kind of inventory management do you have? How do you check stocks? How do I know what is on the website that you really have that many? We have a lot of homegrown systems, actually, in terms of software.

Because, I mean, like, we still have pieces of software in our system that hold the namesake of DEC. We don't have any DEC stuff, obviously. But, you know, it's been computerized for a long time. And as far as having correct stock or numbers for a specific piece of, for a specific SKU, a lot of times that gets resolved in replenishing a particular bin someplace because we don't have enough space

in any particular picking area or picking spot for all the stock usually. So there's periodic checks all the time for correcting that kind of stuff. Do you have an area where most of the things are purchased and then a different area where you only get like one order for this a year? Yeah, so there's a bunch of products that are like different sized uh so they're you know we have large things all the way up to these big server cabinets uh which might be another odd

product that you know people don't know we sell uh and so we may not ship a ton of those and those kind of go in bulk loading areas. But otherwise, things are pretty readily pickable in general. You may not always have all of them in one spot that you need to pick, so they need to get transferred around. But yeah, it's pretty generally accessible across the board. So why do I decide to buy from DigiKey versus a distributor versus like the actual company versus someplace like Future that has more, that wants to come and talk to me? DigiKey never, DigiKey in all of my career has never sat down and said, okay,

how can we help you? It's always been very helpful, but I remember when future and, and, and other companies would come by and want to talk at me. Oh, that's a complex, uh,

complex topic there. Um, yeah, Oh, that's a complex topic there. Yeah, DigiKey actually really has kind of an ethos large distributors and knock on doors and bring donuts and things like that. That's just not kind of part of our ethos. But as far as DigiKey goes, why would people order from DigiKey? Well, DigiKey holds stock. I think that's the biggest one. A lot of other companies in distribution, a lot of other ways of procuring product, even going direct.

There's long lead times. There could be problems with authenticity of product as well, depending on the source. Oh yeah, I had that problem. So DigiKey and a lot of the other big names are all part of ECIA, which basically it's a consortium of distributors that hold standards to authenticity of product.

So there's a lot to deal with there, but we offer just a lot of stock so we can serve just in time as well as larger runs as well across a variety of industries and types of customers. Have you noticed that it's a bit difficult to get some microprocessors lately? Yes, yes, it has been difficult. The business in semiconductors is just kind of going crazy right now. So there's a lot of constrained supply in ICs, in passives, in other things. And there's a word in the industry called allocation. And that's kind of a nasty word, but it's how manufacturers let product trickle out to a lot of different companies. So, you know, somebody's not totally lined down or totally unable to build any product. And yeah, people don't like it when allocation comes around. I don't think I understand. I mean...

Kind of like triage, I think. Ah, okay. Is that right? Yeah. Basically, so a large company can't come in and take all the product of one kind of product. Historically, there's been a few cases where large distributors that may have already been mentioned bought up the world supply of tantalum capacitors. I remember that time. Great tantalum shortage of somewhere in the aughts. Lost me a lot of money because I bought a lot of stock in tantalum capacitor companies for some stupid reason. But yeah, they bought the entire world supply.

There was literally nothing and then started charging 5, 10, 20 times, you know, their previous going rate. And it was, yeah, whenever there are market constraints, people start to get opportunistic and yeah, it gets tough sometimes. Does this allocation process, I mean, does DigiKey rank near Apple? I mean, how do you, do they, do they talk to the little customers and say, oh, you're a startup, you're going to go out of business if you don't get this chip? Or is it all about anybody who's ordering at least a million, you have to tell us why you're the important one? I don't know the answer to that.

Fair enough. What things are you seeing that are difficult to get? A lot of microprocessors are getting fairly difficult. Basic passives look like their lead times are kind of climbing a lot. And we're talking 20 weeks, not two. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, your typical manufacturer standard lead time might be eight weeks. And, I mean, in good times, they're usually a lot shorter than that. That's just kind of what they tell you. But yeah, real lead times seem to be

climbing up a lot. Do you have advice for people? I mean, should I start hoarding my parts now? I mean, there are a lot of opportunistic buying going on, but there's also just a lot of manufacturing going on. Manufacturing worldwide is just kind of going wild right now. Design in parts that can be crossed. I mean, that's really the best inoculation against part availability. So design in things that have multiple suppliers. Yeah, yeah. Multiple suppliers, definitely. Tough for micros.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of microcontroller companies have, you know, have really good footprint compatibility across a bunch of their models, you know, and lines. But, you know, in lines. But, you know, if you're stuck at the top end, like if you have some ST part with 512 kilobytes of flash,

you know, you're, you're probably out of luck on some of those. Or if they, you just have to change companies, in which case. Yeah. Everything's got to change from your firmware to your hardware.

And it's been the demand that increased, not necessarily the supply that decreased. Yeah, yeah. I mean, who knows with COVID and all the supply chain related things earlier. I mean, that probably limited supply a little bit earlier in, you know, earlier last year. But overall demand is just it's very very high yeah am i the only one who thinks that's really strange i i just don't really understand electronics let's just go with that yeah i mean there's even like big manufacturers right now they're idling you know plants automotive manufacturers that are idling plants and you know but it it definitely constrains the ability for some of the economy to work seems like at some

point increased production will come online because that's the way it's supposed to work but it takes a long time to there's not a lot of elasticity and semiconductor fabs yeah just let me go set up a new fab this weekend. It'll be a pop-up fab. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, passes are,

I think even one of the harder ones is like, there's a lot of investment in building those, those kinds of fabs and you know, they're cheap parts. And so it's a lot of risk, I think for a lot of companies to invest in more supply. Yeah, and these are all old process chips. I mean, we're not talking TSMC 5 nanometer here.

All those micros are still on very, very large processes. Yeah, I think even some of the modern micros typically hover around the 40 nanometer process, right? Yeah. Oh, this is depressing. It's fine. I mean, it is fine. But I, you know, I have some clients, I've warned them that I've noticed that it's gotten bad.

If they don't listen, that's their problem. But there have been a lot of people I've talked to recently who didn't realize. I mean, where do you find out this information? I heard a rumor and then I heard another rumor. When you try to order and it says 52 weeks for your cortex M3. Yeah, I mean, the other inoculation kind of against shortages is have your orders in early. You don't necessarily have to pay for all your stuff up front, you know, to get your orders in.

Yeah, and people might need to be more decisive about design decisions. Like, which micro are we going to use? Well, we'll decide between the 256 flash and the 512 flash part toward the end when we know how big the firmware is. Maybe you should figure that out now and go ahead and order them. Wait a minute. What's this you don't have to pay for it that you speak of? Oh, there's lots of different ways to kind of handle that one. So yeah, say you're planning on building 1,200 or some widget in a year, but you really only typically manufacture 100 in a month.

You can schedule and pay only for the amount of product that you only the minimum order quantity, but there's this whole quoting process. And then there is the ship me, subscribe and save on chips. For DigiKey, it's always been like a grocery store. I go in, I get what I need, I leave. Um, but you do have a quoting process and you do have these support features for larger procurement problems. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, scheduling orders was just one piece. Uh, we do have quoting. I mean, we have large quoting. I don't know the kinds of numbers, but maker, a design engineer, something like that,

as well as supporting larger companies across the board. When I go to the website, less so now, but for a long, long time, it was worse than going to Home Depot. Because at least when I go to Home Depot, I'm carrying the part I need that's broken and I can find it. But you don't have a, here's my broken part. How do you recommend people get over the sheer intimidation of a parametric search that gives back 5,242 results. It's hard. And that's a challenge we're constantly trying to overcome and help customers just understand the breadth of product that exists

and how to get into any given family and understand how to search most effectively. I mean, there's strategies and stuff like that but uh a lot of like a lot of people are specialists in certain areas like somebody might know a lot about micro controls and have no trouble going into that family but you know that same person might have to go in and pick an op-amp too and then have no idea how to pick it out. And that's just a really big challenge across the board. I don't know.

To some extent, I want you to have a most popular. Amazon will respond to a search with the most popular items and then I would know what everybody else is using. I guess that doesn't really make sense. What do you think the most popular resistor is? A 0 ohm 0603? Yes, there are a lot of those, aren't there? That'd be my guess. Plus or minus five percent yeah if you if you if you get the minus

five percent please please deliver them to lawrence brookley labs yes yeah someone pointed out five percent of zero is still zero yeah um do you have a service where someone can post a random picture of a broken part and say, I need this? Yeah, there's actually kind of two interesting things there. One of them I kind of mentioned earlier, it was the tech forum. So we have a lot of techs who spend, you know, taking images through email or the tech forum or other methods has been really common over the history of DigiKikey helping people find a specific part they took a picture of or even mates that's another big one that that's pretty common to help people find for a connector mates for connectors yep oh i take a picture and then i i post it to the forum and somebody says that's a mo blah, blah. Here's the part.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. You know, there's one other feature in our DigiKey app. We actually have kind of a, I'll call it pretty early and, you know, very beta-like, but you can actually take a picture of a product and it will try to identify it using ai and fun little bits there so a product like a an electronic component or or like a toaster uh no a product like an electronic component and mostly where we were just talking about like connectors are just their source of huge amounts of support so much yeah that was. Yeah, that was a hard problem.

It is a really hard problem. The pin spacing, the pin width, the pin height. It's all, it's multidimensional and you can't see a lot of it. Yeah. And measuring it's hard. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, our technical staff are just wizards at that. So, I mean, we have a bunch of technicians who are connector specialists.

They've worked in and around that industry for a long time. So we have a lot of people to help figure that kind of stuff out too. It never occurred to me to ask for help. What are the overlooked parts of your website? What are the ones you wish people knew about? One of my personal favorites is the reference design library. It's kind of hidden off in a menu in the header and stuff like that, but it is an area that's been carefully curated to include really good reference designs,

attaching the metadata of the parts that are included in the reference designs, allowing you to search by specs of, say, you need a power supply of something. We have a very DigiKey-like experience in filtering and selecting that way in the reference design library. So maybe you need an ACDC converter that, you know, does 500 watts. Well, you can go find reference designs that are capable of that in there. Okay, so I went to the website and I chose open source MCU platforms. I was tempted to choose power management, but honestly I couldn't tell you if it was right or wrong.

And then I get a parametric search. So many parametric searches. So how much of your life has been using the parametric search? A lot. A lot. I used to actually, for about eight years, I maintained a plugin for a browser for our website that kind of augmented our search as well. So it did some nice things like doing voltage ranges and other things. And the need for that has kind of waned a little bit because we've rolled a lot of those features right into our website now. Okay, so I chose 32-bit.

And now I have to choose how many dma channels or interfaces do i want can no probably not hmm analog inputs analog outputs ide oh i can choose based on ide um can i how come there isn't a i don't want any of these in my results for DigiKey? Because sometimes that is what I really need. Yeah, never show me Kyle. That's a fantastic idea. That's definitely something thought about and figuring out how to do. Okay, so eval part number.

I look at it and I haven't, well, apparently this isn't quite as easy to use as I'd hoped. But maybe you and I will talk about how I find the actual reference design. Anyway, what else is on the website that I should know about and don't, which is everything but searching for components? Yeah, you and a lot of people. There are a lot of resources. There's even some nice little tools, right? We have something called Schemit, which is a schematic drawing tool that actually has even outputs to programs like

KiCad. So you can kind of export little designs that you might've drawn up in there. You have your little calculators too. I find those very amusing. Yeah. The calculators are, I mean, there are some really simple ones and some, we just actually, I think, launched a couple new calculators, a little 555 timer calculator and some other things, too. So the other thing that I like to highlight is we have a lot of 3D CAD models and other things that and those end up being pretty useful to a lot of people. Are those the ones that when I find a part, it's in the list of things about the part? Yeah, yeah.

It's usually, if there is a CAD model, it's usually on the product detail page. And we have some partners in SnappyDA and, oh, what's the other one? I mean, AutoCAD? No, UltraLibrarian. So, yeah, we have SnappyDA and UltraLibrarian. And then whenever we can, we link 3D CAD and other documentations to verify the components sent by the manufacturer.

Specifically, we don't do anything like that. They're more of just a service to speed people's ability to pick out parts and evaluate parts. And let's see. other cool parts of the website that you have a maker io i should click on that it's all about making stuff and their videos and and blog posts and i know somewhere in here if i find it there's a how to go from oh the startup survival guide how to go from being a small startup to shipping more than 10 of things. Who does this work? We have a small team of people who work in and around the maker community. look at bringing their products or things beyond just being a maker project and kind of pushing it

into production of you know at variety of levels but we offer a lot of advice on maker.io things about marketing things about planning things about just ideation and design and then on top of that there's a lot of projects and other things that are highlighted from, you know, that are really popular using Maker, Adafruit, SparkFun, Arduino, you know, a lot of other stuff that way too. There's a lot more here than I would have expected

because I, you know, I hang out at the products page. Marketing, you just said marketing. How do you share with people that you're building more things? We do it a lot of ways. I mean, we have your traditional newsletters. Sometimes stuff just gets hidden in menus on the website too. So it is something that we would like to improve on, I think. And we have areas specializing on industrial automation.

We have areas specializing on IoT and several other kind of areas that kind of help people in certain verticals choose parts or find the types of parts that they need and learn about new technologies in those areas too. Are there any things that customers do that drive you crazy? Read the friendly manual. I think would be the way I would say it. Okay, so they didn't find it on page 47 of the data sheet. No, the ones that drive me bonkers is the people who don't read it and get it answered on the first page of the data sheet. Okay, read at least the first page of the data sheet.

Does DigiKey offer advice about kitting? I know that's been a, as small software companies get into hardware. That's a whole new world for them. They just don't grok kitting. I mean, do you want to define what you mean about kitting? Because that's actually kind of a loaded. Really? So, yeah. Okay, so for Kitting, for me, it's getting all of the components ready to go to the assembly house. And making sure that if I am building 10 prototype boards, I have at least 12 microcontrollers for those boards. And making sure they're all in one place, they're all available. Ideally, the things that need to be on reels are on reels for the pick and place machine,

all that. What else does kitting mean? I mean, kitting can go down to the idea of creating a kit, like the DigiKeyer was a kit. You sent a few parts to some individual who's going to self-assemble something. Or it could be everything you need, just as you described, for a manufacturing run. I think the best tool to leverage for what you were talking about was the BOM manager. And the BOM manager, we're making lots of improvements. We should have some more improvements coming up in terms of being

able to manage lists and features that will really improve that whole process of being able to have extra pieces and mitigate other problems you run into with getting parts to some other company. Okay. What else do you have coming up? There is some fun stuff coming up, but nothing that I can talk about right now. One listener, Matt, had a very good suggestion um he wanted digikey to make a video on how to find components um and i actually like this idea like for one video you'd have finding the oscillator for an mcu design and you'd go through the parametric search and at the end you would have a list of three and talk about which one you'd choose and why and what circumstances.

And then maybe you have a different video that's about a different component and a different reason why you would follow a different parametric search path. Do you already have these? Yeah, actually we do have some of that. We've partnered with Adafruit and they have a video they do every week called The Great Search. And so on that, Lamore goes through and she basically does exactly what you said. If you're looking for this specific kind of green LED, she takes you along that path of how you find this really nice looking specific green LED or oscillator or other kind of product. Thank you, Adafruit. That's really great. Now I don't have to worry about it.

Let's see, what else should I ask you about? Are there other interesting things DigiKey does that people just don't know? A pretty common thing that people don't know is, I mean, we do things like custom battery packs or custom cable assemblies or IC programming. So if you have your hex file ready to go, we will burn it onto a chip. What? Really? How do I? Okay, I know how to buy a chip. I have to talk to someone again, don't I? Yeah. That's the hardest part.

It's not that hard. It's not that hard, especially since I can do the type chat. That's really cool. I mean, cable assemblies, that used to be one of the hardest parts of my job, and now I'm like three steps removed. It's great. But programming chips before I got them, that would be really cool. All right. Most of my other questions involve Minneapolis and Thief River Falls, or Minnesota. How far are you from Minneapolis? We're about five hours north.

North. Yep. How far are you from Canada? We're about 60 miles. I see. We're closer to Winnipeg than we are to Minneapolis. Is it hard to get people to work there? Well, we are kind of the biggest employer in the area.

I think Vero Falls is only like 80 to 100 people. Wait, what? 100,000, right? 8,800 people, yeah. Oh, okay. Wow, that's very small. It's in Metropolis yeah uh so did you key itself just in in this area employs maybe 3 500 people uh and so we we have to pull in a lot of people from surrounding communities surrounding areas uh i mean it's not pretty common for people to commute more than 60 miles to come and work at Ijiki.

And here, 60 miles equals 60 minutes, so it's comparable to a lot of people's commutes that way. What do you do for fun? It's January now, so I assume it's all indoors. Well, I think Chris Speck actually coined this one. I'm into biohacking and psychology. Otherwise known as I have three kids. Three kids, five and under. So my time is pretty limited in terms of fun. It's a joy to be able to, even in COVID times, work at home and be able to see their

little, you know, milestones and stuff like that. So, I mean, I'm pretty thankful to be working here, you know, for the past 13 years and then living in this area. There's a lot of great things about around here. And DigiKey is hiring. Yeah, DigiKey, we are looking for people to help us in terms of software engineers who might be specialists in search or elastic search. We can have some links in the show notes, I suppose, to the careers page. Mm-hmm. What's it like being a software engineer at a, I mean, it isn't even that DigiKey is an electronics company. It's a distribution company.

And so being a software engineer there, it isn't about electronics, is it? You know, that's the cross-section of bits and atoms. And a lot of people interact with DigiKey virtually. So there is a lot of software, a lot of back-end kind of stuff, infrastructure, and a lot of people involved with that. And then you get atoms that show up at your door. So, I mean, I don't have a long answer to that. But, yeah, we have to be specialists in the product we sell in order to accurately represent it.

So, I mean, that's one big thing. We have a lot of people here, you know, hundreds of with uh technical degree backgrounds uh in electronics so it's pretty broad that way what does that look like is it mostly static analysis of okay we got this new part and we're going to understand this data sheet so we can or do you do people actually like uh okay we'll just build something with this and get experience with it? All of the above. Like when I was in the applications group, I mean, creating getting started guides, making application notes.

I even made a dev board with the CC430 product when it first came out. And we sold that as well. There's a lot of different things that people here do. And I mean, there's a lot of people here. So we have teams and teams and teams of people who just look through data sheets and pull that information out and normalize it. And make it so you can actually use our search.

So somebody doesn't put 5 space V and 5V, or even if one vendor rates, you know, their maximum voltage or amperage at some temperature and another vendor rates it at another temperature, you know, we have to find ways to make that known to customers to our users of the website so they can kind of use apples to apples comparisons and select product. It's a big job, huge investment for us. Are there any new components you are especially excited about? Well, it's hard to not get a little excited about that new Raspberry Pi boards and chips that are out. I'm really curious to see kind of what people do with the new programmable IO peripherals.

And in a similar vein, I just realized the other day that we finally have Parallax Propeller 2s in stock. And I've always been seeing it. Really? Prop 2s, or propellersllers and their adventure towards Prop 2. I forgot all about those were coming. I didn't think they'd ever really come. They're in stock. And propeller 2s.

Yeah, I just ordered a handful of the Raspberry Pi chips. Raspberry Pi Picos, the $4 Raspberry Pi chip. That's what he was talking about. It's a microcontroller, which, as Bailey pointed out, should have been called the Raspberry Tart. All right. I have just a couple of more questions. How difficult was the decision to not ship catalogs anymore? I mean, it was tough.

It was one of those things where the scale of the catalog and the scale of the number of products that we really carry, our last catalog had just about 3,000 pages. And so we were adding products at a clip, you know, very, very speedily. And the catalog was way out of date before we even were able to ship it and, you know, assemble it and ship it and get it out. You know, the other thing that made it a little easier in terms of, you know, the decision would be environmental, you know, based things. It was a lot of paper. It was a lot of logistics just to get it out. So it was a tough decision.

I kind of lament the canceling of catalogs across a lot of industries. It's really hard to find and discover products as you go through your career. One of the best things that I have probably done in my career is the first year at DigiKey, a senior engineer and myself, we just sat down with a catalog and walked cover to cover, page by page, and looked at all the products we carried. And the ability to discover products and understand really unique products, that was just such a massive help for me in my career. I can imagine. That would be really cool.

Yeah, there's not really a digital analog to that. So to speak. Yep. Okay, speak, yep. Okay, one last question. And I'm sorry I have to ask this. Is it okay if I use DigiKey data sheets even if I buy from other people? The answer is yes, yes.

People do it all the time. sell products we stock products and you know we we get sales of a lot of products regardless so digit keys website is a tool to engineers and uh you know it just gets used that way a lot of times too well ben it's been really interesting to talk with you and i hope we covered some of the questions that really came out of the woodwork i didn't expect quite the huge number the volume of questions people had when i just said we're going to talk to somebody from didiki any questions and everybody had one um but i think we've gotten through them and now a question for you any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

Be kind you can't control how people treat you but you can really control how you respond to whatever the situation is Our guest has been Ben Hest of DigiKey Thanks Ben Thank you Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting.

Thank you to our Patreon listener Slack and my Twitter followers for questions. I just dropped my phone in my tea. I just thought everyone would like to know. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote to leave you with.

No, actually, I'm just going to go with Christopher dropped his phone in his tea and now he's shaking it out. You should all just have that image for the week. It's been a great day. Bye. Bye. Bye.