The purpose of this thread is to make one central complete list for all the suppliers we all use to buy parts for our robots. Hopefully this can be made a sticky so rookie teams and other can find it easily during the build. Let’s keep it to places that sell and ship to the whole country, not places like “Uncle Larry’s Bearing Supply on the corner of Fourth and Main” Post the name, URL or Phone #, and a short description of what they sell. Hopefully this thread will become a valueable resource for rookie teams and everyone.
Please read the previous posts before you post, no duplicates. Let’s keep this thread usefull and efficient.
They are a great source for spur gear stock (which is way cheaper than buying indivual gears), small bearings, including flanged bearings, chain, sprockets, and lots of other miscellaneous small stuff.
I will be adding anything mentioned here to http://www.firstwiki.org/Suppliers. Short descriptions of the source would also be nice. The page currently has:
General
McMaster Carr (http://www.mcmaster.com
) - probably the widest selection of FIRST related stuff. Raw materials, power transmission, tools, etc. - Small Parts (http://www.smallparts.com
) - large selection, smaller than McMaster, but focused on smaller and more precision engineering. Power Transmission
GlobalSpec (Registration Required) http://www.globalspec.com
Not a supplier, but a huge database of suppliers. Register and you can enter specs for a part and see who has something that fits. Warning: If you click on links to parts you’ve found, you’ll be getting catalogs in the mail.
Isn’t there a rule restricting electronics suppliers to Radio Shack, Digi-key, Newark-in-one, and Future Active? Aren’t all these other electronics suppliers (except perhaps if its a duplicated of something from the kit) illegal?
Eagle (from CADSoft) is the Autodesk Inventor Tool for Electronics Design, you can create your schematic, and then layout your board with it, and there is a free version on the Web site. I would encourage anyone interested in electronic design to take a look at it. APCircuits would be something like sending the Mechanical Design out to a Machine Shop to be created. The cost of manufacture of the circuit board is part of the build cost. The components to put on the board need to be taken from the restricted electronics supplier, and also count toward the cost of the robot.
I guess you could argue that a PCB is only wire and solder, so it doesn’t count as an electrical component, but i can’t really think of any electrical component that isn’t just wire and solder when it comes down to it. I had thought that a custom PCB would be illegal.
By buying suitable supplies from Digikey, and other sources,
you can expose, develop and etch your own printed circuit boards.
It is so much fun that any other way ought to be illegal…
Please do not start a discussion in this thread. This thread’s intent is to list parts suppliers ONLY, and there’s several other threads where you can discuss whether or not a certain part is legal or not. This will allow this thread to remain orderly and to the point.
I’m not sure if this is what you guys were referring to, but heres a site with quite a few products for general robotics as well as repair services for some of the things that you may have accidentally fried.