Found on a footpath ..

I often find things as I walk.

Sometimes they're just pieces of foil, wrapping paper or plastic that have reflected a glint of sunlight into my eyes and caught my attention, other times they're something altogether more interesting .. such as this one ..



It's a 680 ohm resistor, never been used, with some of the reel packaging attached. The nearest electronics store was kilometres away. I've never found components before, not ones that weren't inside some piece of smashed or discarded electronic equipment anyway.

I hope whoever lost it had enough spares to finish their project.

My PICkit arrived today.

My PICkit 2 Starter Kit arrived today. I'm surprised at how reasonable a cost it was, even compared to many of the built-it-yourself offerings out there. The integration with the Microchip MPLAB IDE sealed the deal for me.

It's a real pity Microchip don't produce a Linux version of MPLAB. Hopefully their acquisition of Hitech will encourage them to increase support for the Linux platform.