Organizing Parts
A common household drawer module combined with a label maker makes for a very organized parts system.
Organization is crucial in almost every aspect of life. One of these aspects, as a tinkerer, is being able to find parts easily. I must admit that my floor where I work on projects is littered with failed, partial, or abandoned experiments. For example, one of the things I lie among is a pencil sharpener with four wires coming out to an ominous control box. I often lose parts, only to find them months after the intended project is over. So, I turned to a drawer thingy like in the photo, and just labeled all the drawers accordingly. I have everything from “scavenged little things”, “screws”, and “alchohol swabs” to “chips”, “relays”, and “piezos”. Unless the drawers get really full, they all pull out easily and I can see what’s inside before that even. I want an LED for my Arduino, I pop open the top left drawer and fish around for a good one. Being my geeky self, I get a similar happiness as if each LED was a candy and I was a kid with some spare change to spend. This system has paid its self off in the time saved not looking everywhere and digging everything up in a search.
March 14th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Nice post. Glad to see you’re keeping yourself organized.