I work at a university. Mini-Circuits can be quite generous to schools who can make a justification for a discount. Since they get bombarded with requests, they screen the requests very carefully. Their founder/president/management want to ensure their program makes an impact.
I have actual experience with Mini Circuits academic discount program, in my case Doppler tracking using a low phase noise microwave oscillator. Three words: "Thanks Mister Kaylie!" Your looking at the public, list, price. The academic price will be less, but it is negotiable based on student impact.
Free sample parts /massive hardware donations for academics pretty much disappeared after tax law changes in the late 90s, early 2000s. At best we get 15,20, or 50% discounts on small quantities of items. Often we actually pay higher then consumer prices for a variety of reasons related to liability, and the extra paperwork a vendor has to do to sell to the State. The exception is software, we get seat licenses for some really nice code for next to nothing.
I start doing massive extra paperwork at the 1500$, 5000$, and over 20,000$ levels. Instruments over 20,000$ may need a year and a half of approvals from outside agencies, and require bids. So you want a very specific thermal camera that only is made by one vendor? Well a sole bidder is NOT allowed at that 20K$ level.. Leads to very long meetings, especially if there is no other bidder. My corporate friends just whip out a payment card for stuff like that, and place the order.
In the US, academic hardware funding is way down the past four years. I'm doing more of "Make due with less" and repairing ancient stuff.
Nothing dead goes off the loading dock unless I, or the machinist strip it for useable parts.
What a grad student needs and what goes on a hobbyist bench are usually two DIFFERENT things. I have a habit of trying to go "cheap" as often as possible as funding is scarce and the competition for funding is massive. But often times we need peak performance and high resolution. Graduate students are very costly and expensive employees who work 60 hour weeks.
Undergraduate instruments have to be built better then mil-spec and bad user interfaces or glitches are intolerable. Often I have 60 students in a lab with just two TAs, so the gear has to be good, as a TA can usually only help one small group at a time. Some of our undergrad labs run for 7 TWELVE HOUR days, and every minute of lab time is used. If they do not have good results in the first lab, they will have problems in the next lab in the series, and it will ripple through the whole semester. (Chemical Engineering in my case)
Undergrad EE students, yeah. you can buy them cheap stuff off Amazon as it's a learning experience for them. For undergrad students in other majors, the instruments are often thought of as little more then a needed annoyance, (by the students) as much as I'd and the Professors would prefer they do deep learning about instruments and their limitations. We do have limited time in a semester, and nearly every waking moment is used for education if you have good instructors. Thus we need to make some tradeoffs in what is taught and what is experienced in the lab.
That board is designed for education, and guess what, some times we DELIBERATELY make compromises / faults/quirks in the design so that learning occurs. Some of our labs are impossible to complete by design, just to see how the final report reads, and to get students to ask questions/think.
MY day job is "Senior Technician, Instrumentation" for 137 grad students and about 300 undergrads... We're not allowed to have financial roll-overs, and if we don't spend it, we may not get the same funding the next year. So we really work to see that tax payer money is carefully spent. My work lab is very sparse compared to my home shop. We only buy parts we need, I have almost no stock parts or spares at work.
I measure heat shrink tubing in Dollars per Inch, for example.
I've more then once heard, "Steve, I need a little more Nyquist in your design, cut the sampling rate please". Only to turn around and hear "I need to measure fementofarads to track a droplet passing down a filter medium" in the next meeting.
BTW, on average fifty percent of the grant is taken for overhead by the institution, world wide. Get a 250,000$ grant, only to have just 125,000 to spend.
Steve
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