 The great search brought to you by the Digikey native for it every single legally to use a part of engineering help you find the things that you need online on digikey.com. Thank you Digikey. We're making this segment possible. Lady, what's the great search of the week this week? Okay. This subject this week is finding replacement capacitors because I actually saw a really great thread. It's an older thread, but it was tweeted by Digikey on how to find replacement electrolytic capacitors. So first up, let me show you what we mean because there's a lot of different capacitors and by doing that, let's grab this handy dandy apple to disc to disc drive. So if you go to the overhead, focus in. Okay. So oftentimes when you're dealing, you know, there's people who want to repair or rework old designs. And, you know, it's easy to get. You can actually get electronics that it's like, you know, 30, 40 years old at this point, stuff that was made in the 80s. There's even stuff that was made in the 70s. Boy, that's that stuff. That's like 40 plus years old. And you want to repair it and it doesn't work. And you're like, well, what what can possibly go wrong? Like when you have solid state devices, which this is thankfully, there's some stuff that's going to be damaged a bull and some that kind of wasn't. Won't. So chips like this ULN, this can be blown out. Like if it got damaged or from static electricity, but like the resistors, like resistors don't really go bad. Resistors are resistors. They sort of last forever unless there's mechanical strain. There's also ceramic capacitors here. These little yellow blobby ones. Those are ceramic capacitors. These big yellow discs are also ceramic capacitors. Those also tend not to go bad. These red blobby ones. Those are film polymer, pretty sure. They do sometimes go bad, but not super, super often. They're fairly more durable. Tantalums definitely dry out and electrolytics absolutely fail. And it's very common to see people talking about like recapping a motherboard or, you know, an arcade cabinet because the electrolytic capacitors dry out or the electrolyte inside. There's this liquid. It can flow out and you can also corrode the board around it. And so thankfully, it's very easy to find replacements. Oh, I think this is a tantalum, actually. You can see the plus. This might be a tantalum capacitor. Kind of hard to see. It's fairly easy to replace electrolytic capacitors. And Digikey has them in like every stock, shape and size. And so this thread, so let's go to the computer, is actually kind of neat and looks like they're still kind of up, you know, they have two threads. There is this one, which is like a massive thread. Sorry, there's this. This one is a tutorial thread. And he goes through, you know, you look on the capacitor and it says, especially big ones, it says 50V, one microfarad. It's like, man, that's so great. You know, exactly what you're looking for. One microfarad, 50 volt capacitor. It has some tips and tricks. Temperature rating, you know, whether you do temperature rating and then the sizing, you can, of course, measure it. He says this one is a little bit more challenging because it's when you have surface mount, you don't have markings on the side. You have usually only markings on the top. And the markings are not as obvious as these large, two hole ones where they say like they literally print out all the details. So for this one, you want to look at, there's almost always going to be three lines. The top line is the capacitance. The second line is the voltage rating, which is confusing because it's a letter. And then sometimes it's like a temperature or model HB. And then the third one is a lock code. Again, this isn't like 100%, but it's like almost every single time it's going to be these three numbers. And one thing that's a little confusing is if you have large capacitance, this can be, let's say you have like a 2,200 microfarad capacitor, 2200, 2200. This would be 222 because it would be 22 plus two zeros. Right, let's take a resistor code. We have two digits of like numeric data and then last digit is a number of zeros to put afterwards. But 2200 isn't 2200, it's actually 220. So 2200 and 221 are actually the same number, 220 microfarad. So it's a little counterintuitive. If it's 22 only, that's 22 microfarad. And then if it's 2.2 or like, you know, 2U2 or whatever, it's 2.2. So it's a little bit different than resistors. And then here's what I didn't realize. So first off the series code, you can search on Digi-Key by series code. And so in this case, HB will tell you and that'll give you like hours rating and maybe like the physical size. But what I didn't realize is that letter underneath the number is the rating and the rating codes are like it's done by letter and it's consistent across. And then I like started looking at all my capacitors. Oh my God, you're right, it's consistent. J for 6.3, A for 10 volts, C for 16 volts, E for 25, V for 35 and H for 50. So when you're looking at a capacitor, you can use those numbers to quickly figure out what it is and then use the Digi-Key search to locate a capacitor with the same physical size and microfarad capacitance and the voltage, which are the three things that are most important. And then what's neat is that there is like a lot of people posting and you can like check out these threads. And like you can, like I kind of think it would be a really good quiz time thing. It's like, okay, quick. Can you find me this component replacement? So this one, they have a question like, is this a 33 microfarad or 330? And it's 330 despite this zero is confusing and it's six volt. They don't have the J, so they just say six V, which is, you know, fine. And then, you know, somebody replied and said, hey, you know, here's what I think it is. This one is pretty easy. It's a 100 microfarad, 160 volts. And then even says on the side, 85 degrees C. There are ones that are higher temperature rating. And then this other thread is like chock full of people who are like, you know, here is, I have to replace this. So this is 100, so 100 microfarad. And then VHA, and then remember, the first letter is going to be the voltage rating. So if you go up to here, this handy guide, 35 volts, because it's got a V. HA is the family, so you can search by HA and then one H3 is the lock code. And you can see this, they're actually people helping each other. This 47 microfarad, 50 volts, 47 microfarad, but then it's like, what is this U? I don't know if they have the U. This might not be clear. So they said, oh, UD, oh, sorry, the C is afterwards. So the C, this is the 47 microfarad and it's not UD is the lock code. C here is 16 volts. So you have to kind of like know where to look. Let's see, and then more people posting all sorts of capacitors. Check this out. Okay, and then this one is sneaky, apparently. This one is normally 47, 470, but turns out it's 47. And then this O is a little smaller. It's a 47 microfarad and 16 volts. Okay, so some examples, so check out that thread. So I thought we would do one live by looking at this one on my desk. So let's go to the overhead and we'll pick it out. Okay, so I happened to know this is because I placed this component, but I figured it's good practice. So 220, 220 microfarads and then you see that J and then by looking at the table that I showed you from that Digikey tech thread, 6.3 volts, then you take your calipers and you measure the diameter, 6.5 volts. And then you measure the depth. It's a little bit, it's a little tough to hold on. Depth, six millimeters. So 6.5 millimeters by six millimeters. So then let's go to Digikey and go to the computer and we'll look for 22 microfarads, 6.3 volts. You know, it's funny, it would be cool if I could use like chat to PT to search this. So there's some web tools that you could point it at certain websites. And I think there's a debate about the robots.txt. Some of these tools can scrape them or whatever. Bart, I think you could point certain things. And what I think is gonna happen is maybe even after this video, someone's going to use one of these tools to show you how to navigate a site like Digikey and there'll probably be some helpful things or Digikey who, they're pretty sharp. I think they did the like Digikey Alexa thing where you can ask Alexa for certain things with Digikey. They might be working on that now to be straight up with everyone out there. We're working on looking at our own data and only our own data and having an answer questions about like things in our learn guide. It'll be like, it's tough, it's tough. So we're probably not going to use but the idea of being on the cutting edge with technology and microcontrollers and all this stuff is we try a lot of stuff and some stuff we won't use but it's kind of up to us to be on the forefront of some of these tools. So if anyone is using any of these current tools like chat to BT with any of the plug-ins or Bard which can browse the web, let us know how you're using it with something like Digikey and maybe we'll put it in Descobal data. Okay, back to you. All right, thank you. So I searched for 220 microfiber at 6.3 and it's like, yes, you obviously want a electrolytic capacitor. I could have typed in electrolytic but anytime you're looking for a voltage, if you just put it capacitance and the voltage is like, yeah, that's not a ceramic. Let's look for active. And your question is it polar or bipolar? And then if you go to the overhead real fast, if you have this black marking, that's the polarization mark. That's the negative. And so if you see that black mark or a negative sign on the side, hold on, I'll show on this board. You see that there's a negative arrow and it's like a little negative sign. And then here also, there's a little negative. So that means it's polar. Okay, so let's go back to the computer. So I'm gonna select polar and also dash can place that includes it. And I'm gonna look for a surface mount, although if I'm looking for replacements for that disc two, I will be looking for an axial through hole. Let's also look for only ones in stock. And then we want to pick one that's the same size. And so diameter, remember it was 6.3 and then the height was around six. You know, I'm gonna say, hey, maybe it's okay if it's a little bit higher. But of course, depending on what we're replacing, just make sure you have clearance. But it's always okay to pick a taller one as long as it fits in that footprint. Next question, lifetime temp and operating temperature. This is totally dependent on the functionality of the product. Most are 1,000 hours at 105 degrees C. You can get 2,000, some medical devices or some devices that have extreme temperatures want a little bit better lifetime rating. Of course, that isn't like total runtime. That's just like at extremely high temperatures. And then operating temperature. I'm not gonna ignore this because it doesn't matter. They have some use cases. Whipple currents, this is all related to the ESR, the internal impedance. The lower the impedance, the more you're going to pay. Basic power supplies, actually you don't really have to worry too much. Usually it can go with the cheapest, but it depends if the power supply for your device really does need to have a good quality low ESR, pay more. On the flip side, if you're fixing up these old retro tech things, a lot of them were not made with, they didn't have the highest quality components at the time. We get stuff for so much cheaper these days because it's so much easier to manufacture that I think even the most basic electrolytic capacitor is gonna be fine for replacing just about any motherboard or arcade or game. Okay, so let's, hold on. I wanted to, oh yeah, so I applied that. And then, you know, I'll just for fun, I'll just say cut tape because I only need a few to replace it. So I'll just make sure I can buy them in a small strip. And then there are a few families. So if you look at on the overhead again, sorry, I'm gonna hop back and forth as I do this replacement. This one does have a family code on it, FN. Sometimes you're not gonna, you know, it's not like happens, I believe this is the Panasonic or Chemicon or Nuchion, but sometimes you're using these kind of, you're replacing a generic company. The capacitor may not, the family may not exist because the company doesn't exist anymore, but in this case it does. So can you go back to the computer and we'll select FN. Although again, it's not really essential to do so. And then boom, this is it. And this does look familiar. The Panasonic FN00JO, that's the data sheet, sorry. Yep, that looks right. 220 FN, that's the code. Yeah, that's, you know, it will even give you the marking so you can make sure the series and the code and the capacitance is identified correctly and they're in stock. So if I, you know, if I have to replace a device that had that electrolyte capacitor, this would be the link I could use. That's a great search.