News from Farnell

[Martin Czech]

:::Hi DIYers!
:::I just got a new catalog supplement from Farnell. It has 6000 new products and I found a couple of interesting things in there:
:::Polystyrene capacitors with 1% tolerance and 110 +- 60 ppm/C tempco. The prices are very reasonable: around $0.60 for 47 to 8200 pF.

I never could believe that ploystyrene would die out. I doesn't.

:::Potentiometers with conductive plastic from Spectrol. These are about the same price and size (=small) as the popular Alps pots. They have a flatted 6 mm shaft and cost a little over $2. Any ideas if conductive plastic is supposed to be better than Alps carbon ones?

Conductive plastic is used for precision angle/position measurement.
These things are speced for life time (100000 rotations or so).
They seem to be very reliable, even under heavy duty.

Of course, conductive plastic is not conductive plastic,
there is always the possibility that a manafucturer uses
a wrong recepy, thus bad quality.


m.c.