I’ll admit that I only rarely frequent Jaycar. It’s not my favourite electronics shop for a variety of reasons – one of which is the quality, and the other is of price. But because of a need to purchase some M3 screws with my supervisor, I wandered in with him to the Alexandria Jaycar and had a browse around and I stumbled on a fairly big heavy polybag of stuff with no price and the catalog number XB9000.
I’ll call it Jaycar’s Mystery Goodies Bag. A price of $24.95 gets you one of them – and each one is different. There was only one large sized one there, and I took it –
So, what did I end up getting? A lot of strange and interesting things! Did Jaycar rip me off, or did I get my money’s worth?
Mystery Bag Items
The most obvious thing that was visible was a Silicon Chip Magazine issue from January 2012 (with the barcode plastered over with the XB9000 barcode just to ensure no mis-scans):
I used to like reading these, although lately, print media hasn’t been much of a part of my life. The internet has made print irrelevant for me in general. Worth about $0.
There were four pairs of banana plug to probe test leads with very thin wires (about $4 total) – like the sort you get from $4 DT830B 19-range multimeters:
Next up was a 6-warm-white-LED lightbar made of aluminium from OSRAM.
It was marked LD06A-W3-733-L30 2P4 24V=/12W A7s2 engineering sample. Definitely something interesting when you get an engineering sample in your hands.
Quite a nice interesting lens optic on this one, and it works! Probably worth about $12 in LEDs, although this is likely to be quality OSRAM material, so might even be worth the cost of the goodie bag itself!
Next up is a tube of 5 Computer Products branded PM941 48VDC to 5VDC at 1A potted DC to DC converter modules. Definitely vintage stuff, but each one would be worth $3-5 each in bulk as they’re generally no-maintenance high reliability devices. Probably good for telecoms devices that run off 48v bus, but not that much use for me I’d say.
There was a not-very-exciting USB A to B lead about 1.5m length. Worth about $1, but useful for those damn printers that never ship with any.
Back to exciting stuff – a Corcom branded EMI filter designed for a 10A load, marked 10K1 F1522, made in Barbados and appears to be coded 4th week 1982. Bakelite insulation on the terminals – woo!
Not sure I’d dare apply power to this … but it could come in handy for vintage repairs.
Also discovered a neat sealed cardboard box labelled from Pheonix Contact, dated 13.01.07.
It was filled with green right angle PCB mount connectors for a particular sort of connector. Hmm, without the other half of the connector, it’s not really useful.
Electrolytic caps are always useful – 26 Samwha 470uF 35v electrolytics – lets say about $3 here.
And 20 red-pink coloured PZ56 35VRMS AC/45VDC varistors dated week 26, 2011, maybe about $5 here.
A 300ohm to 75ohm balun to hook up old ladderline to TV, not that useful nowadays since ladderline isn’t used in modern installs.
A still-new-in-bag shielded ferrite-choked monochrome/CGA/EGA monitor cable for good old 286’s and 386’s. Definitely priceless if you’re looking for one and don’t have one, but not of utility for modern machines.
A 2A two pole ganged circuit breaker. This one’s a bit strange – it’s got the AMF logo (not likely related to the bowling alley chain) on it, and it has written on it Wood Electric Operations Potter & Brumfield Div. It’s marked also with 4-20-84 and W92X11-2-2, AMPS:2, 250VAC MAX 50/60Hz, Curve: 2.
There were sample OKW enclosures and knobs
Stainless steel surrounds for certain wall-plates
Five extremely fine-pitched DIL headers from Dupont, Part Number 68827-015.
Latching two-way headers – from Farnell. Funny to see that in a Jaycar goodie bag.
Screw terminal strips, PCB mount – three of them.
Connector hell/heaven – heaps of random connectors – this is only a small sampling.
Assorted, mostly 5W 10R PCB mount ceramic wire-wound resistors – worth at least $20.
Some SMD Microchip PIC microcontrollers and a Trinamic TNC246A Stepper Motor Control IC.
Relays – one seemed to be a multiple-circuit trunk style relay, and two power relays.
A pair of Illinois Lock key barrels each with a matching pair of keys.
Three few metal shunt bars?
Rather less interesting, there were also:
- Assorted nylon straps and screws.
- PGA connectors for old motherboards from the 386/486 era – I threw many of these out because their pins were irretrievably bent.
- Heaps of various other DIL, PCB, IDC and other style connectors, many of them irretrievably bent and worth throwing out … and others built solid as a tank from Amphenol – quality of which you can’t easily find nowadays.
- Various metal springs, washers, plastic PCB standoffs, rubber feet.
- Tuneable inductors, surface mount FETs and regulators.
- Heaps of surface mount resistors and through hole resistors. A few trimpots and resistor packs.
- An occasional AG3 fuse, rotary encoder.
Part of the problem is the sheer amount of time it takes to ‘sort the wheat from the chaff’. After all of the above, my bag still contains this much stuff to sort through. It can get quite disappointing to see how many components get damaged because they decided to just ‘toss it in the bag’ and not bother with any packaging. But still, there’s enough good to outweigh the bad …
It’s been hours of fun, literally, rifling through a bag of bits and seeing what’s in it. If you don’t know what’s there, you won’t know to use it! But seeing as all bags are different, shop carefully and see whether you’re getting value before you plonk your ‘hard earned cash’ onto one of these. At least, I feel, I got my money’s worth!
