 The great search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. Every single week lady uses the power of engineering to show you how to find things on digikey.com. It's a good thing to know how to do because things are hard to find now. In fact, one of the things that I was going to, I was going to show one of my favorite parts and then it's actually not available. So I'm gonna show how to find an alternative to this part. So let's go to the computer and I'll show what I am working on and what part I'm looking for. So I'm going to be driving a VFD display. VFD displays need 20 to 30 volts to bias the grid and each segment. And so I need 20 volts and my thing is running off of five volts. And here's the good news. The 20 to 30 volts, you don't need a lot of current. You only need about 10 milliamps or so, which is not a lot. It's just basically to kind of bias it. The current draw isn't high. It's just the voltage is high. And so if it was like six or 12 volts, six to 10 volts, I might use a switch cap converter because I'm powering this thing off of five. And so I have five, I could double that to 10, but like 10 is not high enough. And I don't want to get two switch cap converters. Switch cap converters are very inexpensive. They don't have a buzzing. They don't have an inductor and don't have a diode. So they're quite nice in general. And I'll use them when I need like five, six, you know, seven volts from three or five, but in this case, again, I need 20. So what I need is a boost converter. So my favorite is, you know, when I use a lot for OLEDs, also need a biasing voltage. Again, not for, they don't use a lot of current at that biasing voltage, but you do need like five to 10 milliamps at, you know, 12 to 18 volts, depending on the style and color. So I kind of come up with a boost converter that I use a lot for all of these devices that need a little bit of a high voltage. And it's based off of the fan 5331. The nice thing about the fan 5331 is it's, it's kind of a nice generic boost converter. You do need a diode. It's not synchronous and you do need an inductor and you need a little resistor divider on the output to set the voltage, but it's a SOP 235. These are very easy to place. They don't take up a lot of space. They're very easy to use. I've never had an issue. I've never really damaged one. They're not high current boost converters. They're very like dependable, simple ones. And there's an internal MOSFET that's good for, you know, one amp switching, which you don't need to use that. I think the, the frequencies are almost a megahertz. So the high frequency ultra low cost, I think like 20, 30 cents in easy use. So that's the good news. The bad news is, oh, and this is how I organize my projects. The bad news is the fan 331, at least when I checked earlier today, was not in stock and it's not in stock. It is a great little chip. Again, you know, it's like, you know, 50 cents in quantity, very easy to use, but it's not available. So let's find an alternative. Yeah, that's what we do. I'm gonna be doing this for the next year or so. Lots of alternative findings. Come to my new site, alt.parts. It's altparts.com. So the thing that's important to us is we want it to be an active DC-DC boost converter with an internal switch and one output. However, the voltage supply can vary. The voltage output, you know, 20 volts or so. The frequency, this is 1.65, we don't need that. And I really do want it to be a SOP 235. So let's see what comes up. And I actually, this is not the one I wanted. Hold on. Oh, right. So here's the thing about the fan 331. I just forgot to mention. So this actually categorized as an LED driver. So boost converters, you'll find them in both locations on Digi-Key. Some of them show up in LED drivers and some of them show up in DC-DC boosts. So just be aware. In this particular case, there are a couple of alternatives, this LM series, which are probably fine and some microchip ones. But I wanted one that was kind of around the same price and also, you know, in stock. And I think there's like, these are in stock. And, you know, they're not too expensive. They're like $1.50. But I wanted one that was cheaper. So I'm actually going to go for, I'm going to search for DC-DC boost. And that'll take me to a different category, switching regulators. Not controllers. I want the regulators because the regulators will have internal switches and it'll like regulate the voltage for you whereas the controller is just like the PWM controller. Okay. So I want active and I want one output. I want it to be surface mount. So select that. And I want it to be that five-sot. So I'm going to pick five-t-sot and then sot 23.5. And I think this is always confusing because there's like lots of different names. T-sot 23.5. And then, yeah, I think that's good. I remember the part I found after I just remembered what it was. And then I want it to be a positive step up with adjustable output because I want to, you know, set it to 20 volts and that's usually not a default output. And then when I search down here, oh, and then I want to make sure that the voltage, sorry, I forgot to mention, I want the voltage output to be at least 20 volts because I need to have that 20 volts bias. So I'm going to skip all the ones that are five, six volts output. And then everything else here looks okay. Right. So this actually is what ended up coming up. So I've never used this part before, but it's very promising. So the AP3012KTR, which has 120,000 in stock, which is kind of sweet. And the pricing is, you know, 15, 20 cents. So this is a adjustable boost. You can give it 2.6 volts to 16 volts in and you can set the output to be 1.25 to 29 volts. There's an internal 500 milliamp switch. Don't forget the switch volt, the switch current doesn't tell you the output. You can rough it as the output voltage divided by the input voltage divided by the switch tells you the current output. So if my input is three volts and my output is 30 volts, then the switch that's, you know, that's a 10 times multiply three to 30, the 500 milliamp switch, I have to divide that by 10 by like whatever the amount I'm boosting is it's like the switches from the input not the output side. So this will give me 50 milliamps output, which is still plenty, right? Even in worst case usage, although honestly I'm giving it gonna be five to 20 volts probably. So I can get like, you know, basically 50 to 100 milliamps out of this. It's a SOP 23. And then this is the pinout for the fan 331. So switch, ground, feedback, shutdown, VIN. And then this is the output for the K package of the AP3012, also switch, ground, feedback, shutdown, VIN. So this will be useful. I think there's another one of these. One second, there is the E and the G. Well, that's probably a temperature thing. Let's use the compare. Can I compare? I've never used the compare. Okay, so it's a little more expensive. Step up. These look very similar. This is E versus G. It's probably like a percentage rating or something like one or 2% accuracy and maybe like the behavior when it latches up. So I'll look at what the difference between the E type and the G type is. But it's cheaper than the fan 5331. So I'm actually gonna pick up some of these and I might use them in some of my designs because like if I can save 30 cents in this chip like there's 120,000 stock, which means it's probably gonna like, sometimes it's like the more there's in stock, the more I trust it. So I think that this is a good, good pick. So I'm going to pick up some of these AP, one moment, AP3012 from Diodink. I do like the AP2112. It's my favorite regulator. So this can be my new favorite newsletter. She'd do a segment in the future favorite regulator. And no, the AP2112 is like, is like pretty sweet. All right, and it's at the great search. That's the great search. And that's a great search.