[PLUG-TALK] light sensor question

Brent Rieck bsr at spek.org
Tue Sep 13 21:15:13 UTC 2011


On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 5:46 PM, Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> wrote:
>> <snip> Is there another place in Portland that sells parts like that?  Or
>> another person who wouldn't mind meeting for a beer to sell said part?
>
> Mine aren't worth a beer. :)  There's SurplusGizmos (Hillsboro) and Norvac
> (Beaverton).  URS (Lloyd Center) is hit-and-miss.  Cascade Surplus
> (Gresham) is interesting but variable, only open Fri and Sat, and possibly
> closing after being named party to a mercury-poisoning lawsuit.

A friend of mine went to Fry's and picked up a phototransistor and a
"super bright" LED (those are deliberate scoff quotes), I had no idea
they had electronic components there.  The phototransistor has
response times measured in microseconds, so it's fast enough, but it's
noisy has hell and will "flutter" on and off (and has a very narrow
sensitivity angle, about 10 degrees it seems).  I'm just going to
order a bunch of ones from catalogs and play with them all.

Thanks for the advice!

--Brent



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