 The Great Search brought to you by Digikey. There you go, Digikey. Every single League Lady Aida looks online at digikey.com and finds... Parts. The parts. That you can buy. And we call that The Great Search. What is this week's Great Search, Lady Aida? Okay, so this week's Great Search is kind of, you know, it's a two-in-one. So one, Pololu, which is a friend company, they're in Nevada. They also do open source hardware and electronics. And they did a massive post about silicon shortages and lead times. And it's like, you know, it's a great article. So go check it out on pololu.com. And one of the things that they showed is like their stock levels for some chips, including MOSFETs. Yeah, so I just want to... Also, you know, please support Pololu. Their stuff is awesome. Yeah, so every holiday season, every time they have a sale, we promote them. And, you know, I'll say this to our, you know, live viewers and everything. I really hope the maker companies and the electronic companies this holiday season maybe get together and cross-promote each other because, like, Adafruit doesn't have every single thing. And every year we post all the sales to other sites and everything. Pololu and Adafruit always do that together. And we try to get the spotlight on Pololu. But, you know, there's this thing that happened. Like, we all used to be a community and was smaller when we first started doing open source hardware together, like 15 years ago. And now everyone's a competitor and, like, knives are out. And, like, there's people who don't even talk to each other anymore. I think given that we've survived a pandemic, and not everyone did, but given that, like, we're here now, some of us did, maybe it's a good reset. So, anyways, part of the great search is finding the goodness in each other. Yes. In addition to this part, back to you, Lidia. You're searching for another good... Their stuff is available at digikey.com as well, so you can purchase through them. But please support Pololu. They do awesome robotic stuff. I really like they posted some really good information about their part shortages and how they're struggling. And they mentioned that even MOSFETs are hard to get. Yeah, it's like the Silicon shortage. Like, I know that there was a blog post by Playdate, by Panic, and they were talking about how their STM32, F7 chip, or H7 chip, whichever it is, it's like they got a lead time of two years. And I saw another company say, you know, we have an FPGA, some crowdfunding project, and they're like, our FPGA is delayed also for like a year or two. But, you know, those... And those are like the things you're popular because you hear about these chips and sensors being used in automotive. But we're seeing this too. Even MOSFETs, like even the most jelly bean of parts, are getting hard to get. Or you order them and you're not getting them. And I always found that a little bit weird because I'm like, you know, if you make a... You know, if you make a silicon wafer with MOSFETs on it, I mean, you're going to get like hundreds of thousands of them per wafer. I mean, they're very simple. They're easy to fab. But it could be that that process is booked up. So, one of the things that we actually were... This week I had to go and find an alternative for is for our prop maker featherwing. It's stock because we actually couldn't get... There's not a lot on here, but we couldn't get the MOSFET that's used with turning on the RGB LED. So this prop maker wing part of it. And you know, of course, wouldn't I design this? I was like, what's the free and channel MOSFETs? What's the big deal? How could they ever not be available? But we have a little RGB LED driver and you can see this ultra high power LED. A lot of people who make, you know, sabers or props, they have a very bright LED. We just did a prop with it for Halloween. David Pager did it and they used an LED and they said, compared to a new pixel, actually kind of the point source created a nice effect. But to drive these LEDs, you actually have to use a very powerful and channel MOSFET with a good power supply because these LEDs can be three watts. They can be an amp per channel or even more, maybe, you know, amp and a half for the red LED. So it's a sizable amount of current. So you want to drive it well. So here is the circuit design we had for the prop feather wing. So you see there's an n-channel FET and there's a light pull down, red, green, blue, very small little chokers just to keep it from, you know, running away thermally. And we spec the DMG3406. So let's go to the Digi-Key and this is the part I can't get. But let's look at this specs. GMG3406. So there's two versions available here, but I think it's just the real size. It's how many is per reel. And yeah, one of the tricks I've done is, you know, I like to type in, you know, just a number here. If you're not getting a thing that pops up that tells you like the dates, it doesn't mean they're not going to get them, but it's kind of like, it fills me with an ease, you know what I mean? It's like, what do you mean you don't even know when you're going to get the next reel in? So that's when I think we even booked some and we haven't gotten them yet, but we went out and so we have to find an alternative. So, you know, when you're doing this, use the product attributes to select an alternative. So we're going to guess it's going to be a single MOSFET. It's going to be an end channel. Now, I'm not going to click active. This is a secret because I did it first night. I didn't find a good alt. And then I was like, well, what if I click nonactive and you'll see something came up? I want a MOSFET. Now for the drain to source voltage and the current and the drive voltage and the RDS on and the VGS. Again, I don't need it to be that precise number. I just need it to be around that number. So I'm not going to check those off. I'm going to then filter by groups because it's like, I just need 50 mil ome about or less, right? Less is better. So I can always select anything under that amount. However, I do want it to be a SOP 233 and I want to be, of course, pick and place compatible. I want to use the same package and PCB because I've already got that designed. Okay, great. So I've used so much with 345 available. Now, even though I don't care about active, I do want it to be in stock. And that basically brings it down to 50. So, you know, there's not as many of these in stock months surprising. Okay, so next up. So the most important is that continuous current drain. Now, again, I mentioned, you know, the LED, people can connect three to nine watt LEDs. So I want to be able to draw, you know, it was like 3.6 amps. I want to have something at least as good. So I'm going to select 3.4 amps, which a little bit less, but still, you know, well within reason or above. And that gets me to 16 options. And then the next thing is the RDS on. So I do want to have the resistance be low. I mean, I really need to make sure the thing that's going to be challenging is if I have to dissipate a lot of heat through this transistor. So I want to reduce the RDS on because it's not really heat sunk and it's driving a lot of current. So I had 50 milli ohms before and I'll basically select, you know, 58 or under. So I'll give myself a little bit of a little bit more option, but still. For the VGS on, I think let me see what it was. I think it was 1.7. Sorry, the VGS is 2. I will say that I'm driving it from 3.3 volt logic. So I'm actually not concerned. Nothing, you know, I that's the one thing I'm really not too worried about that the VGS everything here is under 3.3. So that's good. So let's see what we've got for options. So there are actually a couple options available, which is always a really good feeling. See if there's any other the VGS max I don't care about and the gate charge I don't care about. So these are all these are all pretty good. And then when I sorted from sorted down from stock, I actually got a lot of good options here. So looks like, you know, one thing that I thought was interesting is that there is a DMG 30402. So this is a, you know, like a sister product to the 30406. And this one actually just has a slightly higher current. So it's actually slight improvement. And it has a lower VGS. So this would be a really good option. And there's also the AO 30406. And again, I always kind of like it when there's like a competing company that makes a chip with the same sub part number. Because it's like they're going to match the specs pretty well. Again, I'm like, okay, clearly this was meant to be a drop in replacement. Even though it's not guaranteed, even though you should check the datasheet, it's kind of nice, right? So it's kind of like, you know, when you go to the grocery store and they're like, oh, they don't have Dr. Pepper, but they have like Mr. Pib and you're like, well, it's like a Mr. Doctor, PhD, whatever, it's close. So both all of these are quite fine. But, you know, these three I would are going to say are the top picks because they have, you know, I need a lot. They have over 40,000 in stock. The DMG 30402, I would probably actually want to test it just to make sure it worked. But for drop in replacementness, the AO 30406 is another really good option. And what's interesting is that this was an R&D, but they have 40,000 stock. And again, I don't really care. I just want, I just have to get through the next couple months until that order that I placed for the DMG 30406 comes in. So there's definitely going to be a lot of like, you know, pick around, find the right component to match. But for, you know, MOSFETs, when you spec them, I'll say it's tricky because there's so many specifications and some of them matter and some of them don't. Like because this isn't driving, you know, anything high speed, I don't worry about the gate capacitance so much. But that might matter to you. And again, like the voltage, the gate threshold doesn't matter. And I know the DMG 30406 has worked really well. So even though there's a chip that has slightly better specs, I'm actually probably going to be safe and stick with these specs just so I don't get surprised by something. Even if on paper something looks better, I've learned like, do try to stick to the thing that's closest to what you've got. And then change over to specifications if you need to. And that's a great search.