 Where in the world is that part of Digikey? All right, the great search brought to you by Digikey. Thank you, Digikey. Every single week, Lady Adie uses her powers of engineering the last decade plus to find things on the Digikey site this week. This one came in from someone we know. Yeah. And they said, hey, I'm looking for a supplier for some anti-static stuff. Yeah, so let's go to the overhead and I'll show what they're looking for. So they're making feather boards with headers attached. So like this, this like, you know, Metro, Metro mini. When you've got the headers attached, you really want to ship it with something protecting the headers. And you can use bubble, but really nothing is quite as nice as anti-static foam. You press it in and first off, it's extremely satisfying. It's got like a little ASMR thing going on there and it doesn't move. It doesn't come out. It protects the pins. So you don't get something like this where it's like, oh no, the pins getting bendy bendy. Not so good. So they were asking like, well, how do you get anti-static foam? And it's one of those things where there's really actually not that many suppliers of it. It's a kind of, it's not specialized, but it's sort of, there's only sort of like three companies that supply it. And it's both incredibly common, but like it isn't advertised. You know what I mean? Like it's like copy paper. It's like, you know what to get it or you don't, but you're not gonna, you're gonna see ads for it necessarily. And so I thought I would show how to find anti-static foam and there's a couple different kinds and you really wanna make sure you get the right kind. You want this firm, firm kind that you can, you know. It's like shopping for tofu. Yeah, you want the firm tofu, not the soft tofu. I personally like soft tofu, but if you're stir frying, you want the firm tofu. Yeah. So you wanna get a computer? Yeah, let's go to the computer. Okay, so let's go to Digi-Key. So the first thing you can do is just look for anti-static foam, which will get you some things. So there's, you know, there's static control devices. Now I will say that, you know, if you're going to use this like, so statistically speaking, statically, statistically, you're not gonna have as much ESD damage to your chips and boards as historical. Like sometimes people get really kind of like nervous and they're like, oh my God, you're putting chips in something that isn't anti-static and oh my God, what are you gonna do? What are you doing? It's gonna get damaged. For the most part, you know, chips these days are way more durable than in like the 80s and 70s when they didn't have, you know, built-in ESD diodes and the process was a lot more delicate. Nowadays like chips, look, you can definitely destroy them but it's just not as easy, right? They're much more durable. That said, if you're going to use foam, you might as well use anti-static foam and anti-static foam is available both in pink, pink style and black style. They're both the same. Neither, they're going to both work just fine. If you do need a large quantities pre-cut, that's a separate service. I'm just gonna show you where to get like gigantic sheets. Okay, so under accessories. It's a thing, it's under accessories, right? Not under grounding mats. So you can see, okay, we're getting close but here's the thing, the problem with this is it's actually kind of hard to see what you're looking at because it's like, these are two different things but they look the same. One of them is soft and you can actually see, you know, sometimes you get like super soft urethane foam like protecting a PCB. You're not gonna be able to get the pins through this. It's actually just like not gonna, it's just not going to sink through. So instead, let's, first off, let's only look at active. Hold on. And so the important thing is the specification. So there's thickness and specifications. So the thickness, you know, get whatever thickness is, you know, you need, you know, measure the headers that you want and then how thick you want it. But the most important thing is that if you want it to be the stiff type, you want to be cross-linked. That's the name of the type. I don't think that the closed cell is the, I don't know whether the closed cell is the right kind and I'm pretty sure it's not. But what I really like is three eighth inch cross-linked. So let's look at all the three eighth inch options and then here's the thing. There's also the sheets available in three quarters, sorry, three eighths. Let me add five, 16th also. Okay. So then, yeah, so there's this, but you can even kind of tell, this is like soft and squishy. You know, be careful. This is the conductive and this also, I don't know if it's firm or not. This one definitely looks soft and squishy. Cush it in guard. Yeah, so that's not going to be the right kind. So let's also look for what's in stock. Okay. So this one soft, you don't want that. And this is also, you can tell it's soft, like you can even see the corners kind of bending. So the one you want is this. And what's nice is they even have a photo showing it in use. So you're like, yeah, that's what I want. You can see the chips are like plugged into it. And so these are, they come in gigantic sheets to two feet by three feet. So because you're going to pay for the shipping, it's like a big box, you should get multiple sheets. Like I usually get like five plus sheets at a time. And then they're really easy to cut with any scissors. And then what you would do is I actually recommend putting all the boards in, like on the large sheet and then cutting them rather than trying to cut them into like small sheets or die cutting them and then pressing them. Although that can work. It's just, I find that the more surface area you have, the easier it is to plug it in. Otherwise it's like, when you're near the edge, you don't have enough material pushing up against the pins for it to plug in. Just if you go through this, you'll be all, and you do that, you pre-cut the square. It'll be like, oh, I remember she said, don't do that because of this thing. That's very annoying. So I just recommend, you know, you do what they're doing, which is you plug everything in and then you cut the sheet. But you do get a large amount. You get, you know, six square feet, which is like, you know, a big chunk. So it's not cheap. It's like 50, 60 bucks. But you get a lot and, you know, I would basically buy 10 sheets that would last me like six months when I was doing kits. And I'd put chips in them and you can put feathers in them. And then of course, if you are using stacking headers, extra long headers, you don't want three eighths. You want one half inch or whatever. Just measure whatever it is and add a little bit. And that's the thickness of the foam you want. Okay, a couple of questions. Yeah. First up, anti-static foam versus tubes. And then the second part of the question is, anti-static foam from a few decades ago, to break down after a number of years, crude pens, is today's anti-static foam any better? I don't think it's going to be made much differently yet. I mean, I think it lasts a very, very long time. Like decades, I've got foam, you know. I haven't heard anything like that. I've never heard of any foam issues. I think the soft foam will break apart much sooner than this crosslink stuff, which is quite durable. I'm not quite sure civilization's going to last another 10 to 20 years from now. You've got other problems. So that's future problems, but I think any foam is probably going to be okay. Yeah, this is the stuff I use. And I think it's great. And this is from Conductive Containers, who I also, we had on INMPI and they make, they'll do custom stuff for you always. So if you need, if you do want stuff pre-cut or pre-shaped, they'll do it for you. Like you just have to order like, you know, 10,000. But I just kept these with scissors and it was great. All right. That's what I got. That's it with the foam questions. And that is? Foam foam. Discalated. Release the foam. Where in the world is that great search