Farnell at it again, when will they learn.

[Simon]

Just got an email from farnell advertising this site on my work addrewss: https://www.forthings.io/wps/portal/eu
let me guess, there is a hidden reference to IoT and they hope it will be the latest craze, well hopefully they at least keep the stuff in stock or there will be lots of dissapointed kids, burnt on their first entry into the world of farnell incompetence.....

Oh and the ripping off of the arduino look 

[kaz911]

haha - and just as slow a site as the main farnell site... Click - have a coffee - and lunch - and yahhh - page rendered...

[Simon]

Yea well probably on the same server as the parametric search that is struggling to cope.

[EEVblog]

Offering design services it seems:

https://www.forthings.io/wps/portal/eu/services

[Simon]

HAHAHA,  have an idea? give it to us and we may give you 5%

[Simon]

Mind you they used to make stuff, work uses a company formed by two guys that met while working at farnell years ago when they really designed and made things. The MD designed part of their very popular power supply which I gifted him one of after it reached the end of it's long career at work.

[ConKbot]

Wait, who is doing the making?  Because I'm not sure they fully qualify the "make MORE" statement.  Seeing a $60 display, $100 board with blinkenleds, and a $200 SBC. Pretty sure they mean "make more money for us"

[Simon]

so all of their products are just dev boards, the what you get for your £3000+ does not specifically list circuit design while it does list mechanical design, sounds like their idea of designing you a product is a Raspberry Pi in a box and some addon boards...... the stock images at the top of the page are hilarious...

[EEVblog]

so all of their products are just dev boards, the what you get for your £3000+ does not specifically list circuit design while it does list mechanical design, sounds like their idea of designing you a product is a Raspberry Pi in a box and some addon boards...... the stock images at the top of the page are hilarious...

£3000 doesn't buy you much professional product design time...

[kaz911]

You call that slow? It renders with no delay on my dual core 3.5W TDP Core i7-Y (formerly known as Core-m) over WiFi with one floor and one dry wall in between. Either you need a faster computer or you need to fire your ISP.

I think it might be time-of-day dependent - here it takes my Chrome browser 17 seconds - last night it took a lot longer. And my internet is not slow (for British Internet...)

[hans]

You call that slow? It renders with no delay on my dual core 3.5W TDP Core i7-Y (formerly known as Core-m) over WiFi with one floor and one dry wall in between. Either you need a faster computer or you need to fire your ISP.

I will reconsider my symmetric gigabit ISP, and consider one that can perform data teleportation. Or.. realize that not all of us are located in US, which is the location of the webserver.
I get a 180ms ping time to the domain, which doesn't help in handshaking all those individual TCP connections at all given the HTTP 1.1 protocol. No wonder the 6 second load time to a single product page.

But I suppose it's not a fast webserver anyway, as 1.1 seconds "wait time" for just the HTML isn't particularly fast. It seems to be shared with another (backend?) avnet domain, which probably has enough load already going to it.

[Simon]

I believe they are US owned anyway? The scandal is that in the UK we have as resident distributors farnell and RS, both with flaws in how they do things, if only they merged and kept the good bits of each company it would be almost perfect.

[Simon]

so all of their products are just dev boards, the what you get for your £3000+ does not specifically list circuit design while it does list mechanical design, sounds like their idea of designing you a product is a Raspberry Pi in a box and some addon boards...... the stock images at the top of the page are hilarious...

£3000 doesn't buy you much professional product design time...

No it does not so what they mean by they will design your product for you is they will pick some dev board, write a bit of code and 3D model you a box to 3D print....... clearly they understand nothing of actual product design. What would the world come to if we took all of the dev boards away......

[nanofrog]

I believe they are US owned anyway? The scandal is that in the UK we have as resident distributors farnell and RS, both with flaws in how they do things, if only they merged and kept the good bits of each company it would be almost perfect.

According to Wiki, Premier Farnell is a British owned company (Headquartered in Leeds). In regard to the US, they own Newark/Element14 (recently rolled MCM Electronics into Newark).

FWIW, I liken MCM to CPC; same ownership but less expensive for the same products.

[Simon]

oh, I didn't think we believe in owning companies abroad, I just assumed like everything else it was the other way around and some foreign company owned Farnell. I wonder where they bother to pay tax..... sadly RS is just as hopeless so they are both jointly complacent.

[dmills]

RS has probably the worst website of any full service component distributor, try finding **ANYTHING** on there if you do not have an exact part number.

Personally I tend to use Digi/Mouser depending on what I need, the extra day or two of shipping trumps the pain of trying to find the needful bits on RS.

Regards, Dan.

[Simon]

I did use digikey for once for a part and told the assembler to go there as it was impossible to find on the stupid RS and farnell website