[Seth-Trips] HSC Electronic Supply (when?)

[Seth David Schoen]

http://www.halted.com/

                           HSC Electronic Supply

   HSC Electronic Supply is the techno-tinkerer's premier high-tech
   shopping place... most of the engineers and technicians in Silicon
   Valley know about us. Shouldn't you? For over 30 years HSC has been
   the Bay Area's source for a unique mix of day-to-day electronic
   components, test equipment, computers and parts, as well as a
   mind-boggling array of Silicon Valley exotica! Now we present our
   unique mix of inventory to the world!

Here's a slightly edited version of something I wrote to Nick after a
previous trip:

I got it at Halted in Santa Clara over the weekend -- my first ever
pleasure trip on Caltrain.  Within easy walking distance of the
Lawrence station are (aside from CostCo Wholesale) an all-you-can-eat
salad buffet restaurant and Halted (now HSC Electronic Supply).

They have 50-pound regulated power supplies that can supply _insane_
amounts of current at 5 volts (like 50 amps).  They have 20 and 30
year old scopes.  They have big breadboards.  They have _lots_ of
relays and motors.  Not only do they have a wall of resistors (from
milliohms to megohms with thousands of values in between), they
even have a wall of inductors, sorted by inductance in Henrys!

They have some big capacitors (about 3/4 the volume of a volume of
Knuth; electrolytic) with capacities in dozens or hundreds of farads
(remember that most circuits specified picofarads, microfarads, or
millifarads).  They have deep-cycle rechargeable 12-volt batteries
like those used in solar cars and UPSes.

They have LEDs and LED displays and dot matrices of LEDs and stuff,
and also various LCD panels for about $4 (but without driver circuitry).
They have spools with tens of thousands of meters of wire, all colors,
all gauges.

They have a bunch of broken industrial stuff, and some that works.

They have one used industrial UPS.  I think it was rated at 60,000 VA
(remember that the larger APC UPS for a desktop machine is rated at 600
VA).  It is actually only about $400 or $500, which is well under 5%
of the cost of equivalent hardware new from APC.  Maybe under 1%.

They have meters and gauges and counters (like, that show _physical
numbers on wheels_ based on how many pulses they have received, like a
digital version of the odometer in a car).  I was actually afraid to
buy one of them because it looked like it could have come out of a
1960s Geiger counter.  Some of the gauges have kind of absurd ranges,
like 0 to 1 kA (remember that it's rare for a small appliance to draw
just _1_ A).

I couldn't find the ICs, until I looked in a corner of the store and
saw that they have only about 40 different chips, but all of them are
sold from spools or tubes of 500 or 1,000 chips apiece.

They have a laser diode driver board for like $500, with no
explanation of what you do with the laser diodes.  It is plugged into
switches which are labelled with various chemical names that are a
little scary.

They have power transformers, including some pretty big and heavy
ones.  They also have a wall of tansistors and op-amps (sold in
much smaller quantities than TTL or CMOS chips).


My idea has been to take a trip on Caltrain on a Saturday or Sunday to
have lunch at Sweet Tomatoes and go by HSC.  Both of those are easy
walking distance from the Lawrence Caltrain station.  I'd like people
to come with me, so I'd like to get suggestions of which weekend would
be good for people who are interested.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5