 All right, The Great Search, brought to you by Digikey, Ada Fruit, made in America. There's nothing more American than Lady Ada, Digikey, and The Great Search. So what are we? We're American companies and we're American. What are we doing this week? Okay. So it's, as always, it's a part shortage, and so we're coming up with all these techniques and every day I'm spending a significant amount of my time doing parts, alternative sourcing, and finding what parts to get when we can't get certain parts. And some things I definitely can't get, but sometimes there's like little things that you take for granted, like things that I normally wouldn't have to chase after, but because there's a shortage and I'm not sure I'm gonna get some parts, I'm trying to be a little bit more flexible. So- Everything is suspect now. It's a little suspect. Well, you know, we did, we talked about flip-flop packages before we talked about alternatives, how to find alternatives a bunch of times. Funny, when we first started The Great Search, I was like, oh, maybe we'll do one or two episodes where we do alternative sourcing, and now it's like every episode. In fact, all the comments across all the social media platforms, you can see it from professional engineers, all the way to beginners, they're saying this is the best series because I can't find anything anymore. Okay, so here's, well, maybe I'll do a two-fer. Maybe I'll do a two-fer. So let's go to the computer and I'll show the thing that I was tasked with today. So we make this really nice universal thermocouple amplifier with the max 31856, and you can see it's out of stock, why, because there's a part shortage. And so the team was like, hey, we bought a reel of these on order, and you can back order and it takes a while to ship, and they're like, but we just ran out. So can you like maybe scrounge a couple just to hold us over until the reel comes in? And the reason we couldn't find any is because, sorry, it didn't ship yet, is because the part number in our internal system for how we track it is this, the max 31856MUD plus T. And the plus T stands for plus tape and a reel. It's on the tape and a reel. We buy, we like to buy reels because the pick and place loves the reel. It's so easy to load it in. They're easy to store. They don't run everywhere. And so we traditionally would just buy a reel of these fellers and get them in, load them in. But again, we back ordered it and it hadn't shipped yet. And so I was like, oh, well, let me see what else is available. And it says, oh, alternative packaging. And I, this is a new thing just to get at it. So be sure to click on that. And when you click on that, it's like they have thousands of stocks, 13,000. There's like more that I could ever use. And it's the same part. I'm not used to seeing that. What, 12,000? I know it's shocking. Is that a mistake? Yeah, no, it's real. But this time- Is that how much it costs? That's how much it costs. It's, it's, it's an interesting, right? So this is tube. So parts that come in tubes, dip chips, you know, historically have come in tubes, but you can get SOIC chips. And like Maxim and like Microchips seem to be really into like shipping stuff in tubes. Now personally, I have never seen anyone who says I prefer tubes. They're annoying to handle. You have to pop each one open. And you have to like do this weird cut thing to load them into the pick and place. So oftentimes when you're doing manufacturing, partner will say like, please don't chip us tubes. We really want things in cut tape with leaders or in real so we can load them into the machine. Another thing is that you often can't have more than one chip into, even if you do have a tube loading part for, you know, vibrator for your pick and place, you only do one. So you're probably like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? You know, do I have to like hand place these? No. Because one of the things you can do is you can get tube parts taped. Try saying that 10 times fast. So what you do is you buy the tubes and then you send it to a taping agency and then the agency will do the work of putting it into a custom taping wheel for you. Are you gonna pay a little bit? Yeah, there's a set up fee and then you're gonna pay a couple cents per part to get it taped. Of course, weird shaped parts are gonna be more expensive. But we like to use Argosy. That's my recommendation, so that's my tip. Does anyone say I'm gonna send it to the agency? No, they just say they're just- Does anyone ever talk like that? They said they're gonna send it to Argosy. Argosy the agency? I'm gonna send it to the Argosy. So this is cool. So they do this a lot. They're in California. We use them, you only 10 by the week. You can even drop, ship your tubes to them directly and then put in the purchase order and they'll take care of it. And I've always had excellent luck. They are really good at always putting the parts, identically like nothing gets rotated and we use them all the time. So there's some parts that we use that don't even come on tape and reel. So we use Argosy. There may be other services that do this, but this is the one we use and I've had excellent luck with them. So I think it's the good partner. Did you get the parts? And then Argosy to get them taped. And that's my great search. It's a little bit more of a hint than a search. But it's part of how to deal with a part shortage. Gotta be a little bit flexible. Go to, why not? That's a great search. Go America. Happy birthday America. Happy birthday America. Bye bye. Where?