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Digi-Key has changed and it is not very good

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bombledmonk:

--- Quote from: floobydust on December 30, 2020, 06:41:56 am ---I tried their LED Indication - Discrete... it's mostly useless.
Why can't you just click buttons on the (root) colours you want - blue, green, red, ice blue etc. instead of this insane picklist from hell.
The picklists are just populated by whatever a manufacturer specifies, rows and rows of irrelevant numbers.
Nobody picks a forward voltage like this, pic related.

--- End quote ---
The one, less than ideal, thing I can say is the easiest way to get around this is to type the colors you want into the "search within" box at the top of the filter area.  We are looking at ways to improve this situation, here and several other areas like MCUs.



--- Quote from: floobydust on December 30, 2020, 06:41:56 am ---I noticed the dimmest LED in the world? and it's a weird Lumex LED with built-in comparator for low battery indication. Totally orphaned because it's not just an LED, you'd never find that in this in the Product Index.
It's never going to (it didn't) sell, you could never find it. NSL4944 forever.

Digi-Key should blow out these oddball parts in a surplus section.
Why don't they have a surplus section anyhow, there's lots of oddball parts that will never sell. I wonder where they go.

--- End quote ---
You actually ran across one of the "lucky" unique parts that seemed just oddball enough for you to investigate.  A lot of really cool parts don't really have a great way to "market" themselves on their own manufacturer's websites, let alone distributors.  Out of curiosity I just checked that Lumex part, it has enough sales to justify shelf space.  That said, lots of products end up at a metal recovery recycler or going back to the manufacturer.

Part Data, Data Normalization, and Taxonomy is an extremely challenging task that involves 100's of people.  Oddball parts are one of the hardest things to deal with and regularly get the short end of the stick.  One key thing to remember though is that parts are not always discovered on a distributor website. They are also found via other methods like FAEs, word of mouth, manufacturer's websites, reference designs, etc., but having the part numbers and being in stock is advantageous for the procurement folks at companies regardless of on-site findability.  If it's not it stock somewhere, most people won't design it in. 

floobydust:
A problem is the picklists are being blindly populated by specific values from each manufacturer- instead of a class or grouping, or range to input. The result are huge picklists that are a click fest and totally unusable. The one LED out of 20,320 gets a spot in the main picklist at intensity 0.01mcd and it's silly clutter.
I can't specify a range for ANY parameter such as brightness, forward voltage.   :palm: The focus is on getting all that analytics crap bogging everything down but the developers can't change it to a range or buttons? Is this some kind of rocket science where the god of Java must be consulted?
Nobody shops for LED's based on exact forward voltage. It's a grouping based on the semiconductor technology i.e green LED InGaP with ~3V is totally different than AlGaInP with ~2Vf.
Nobody shops for LED's based on exact brightness, i.e. 3.7mcd verses 3.92mcd


All you have to do is sort by any column and look at outliers, they are almost always errors. LED Indication - Discrete
Example: LED Lens Color BLACK? wtf is that, where is your common sense. No IR for indicators nor for the long wavelengths. None of those 3 parts are correct, oh wait they're all actually phototransistors "Phototransistor LED Indication" ???  One is a Marketplace item "Color: Phototransistor"  :palm:

I sorted my search results by Forward Voltage and noticed many are 14V, 12V in a T-1 package having an integrated resistor  :o  which is interesting but you don't offer it as a property in the Features column so I would never really know. If it has a built-in resistor or comparator (low battery detect), those are features.

SVFeingold:
Though I love DigiKey I concur with the annoying picklists. And also the way sorting is sometimes done...

0.8V
0.9V
10V
1V
1.1V
12V
etc.

Comes up from time to time. The best example of a company saying to suppliers "you will fall in line with these categories and you will like it" is McMaster. And look at what a joy that site is to use.

Same for manufacturer-specific footprint codenames (for common footprints) getting mixed into the list. Which can actually be useful sometimes, but mostly just gets in the way. I get that it's a huge amount of work to do for all the parts already in the system, but it needs to happen sooner or later.

_joost_:
There is a filter selection to exclude marketplace products

asmi:

--- Quote from: bombledmonk on January 05, 2021, 09:21:57 pm ---One key thing to remember though is that parts are not always discovered on a distributor website. They are also found via other methods like FAEs, word of mouth, manufacturer's websites, reference designs, etc., but having the part numbers and being in stock is advantageous for the procurement folks at companies regardless of on-site findability.  If it's not it stock somewhere, most people won't design it in.

--- End quote ---
This is true for major parts like CPU, interface IC, when major part of your design revolves around that choice, but there is a whole bunch of what I would call "support parts", which are necessary for main parts to work, but are not super-critical as to what specific P/N or vendor to use. These are things like passives, or transistors, logic level converters, simple logic gate ICs, and other things of that nature. Capacitors are especially annoying - for decoupling you'd want low ESL, for DC-DC converters - low ESR and high ripple current - good luck finding either of those parts on Digikey via filters. Part of the blame for this goes to manufacturers, as they rarely publish these things, but the end result is that it's still a nightmare with trial-end-error being the only viable method at the moment.

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