My first order of eBay components for 2018 arrived this week! Firstly, an ATMEGA328p kit containing the DIP-28 chip, a 16Mhz crystal and two 22pF ceramic capacitors. I’m going to use these to prototype my first fabricated PCB project, an RGB LED strip controller and need to make sure everything works as it should before I commit to having it made. The kit cost £3.81 and was from ‘atelecs’.

By the way, the ATMEGA was pre-loaded with the Uno bootloader, if you’re thinking of building your own barebones Arduino, ensure you either get a bootloaded chip or know how to burn the bootloader yourself.

To go with the ATMEGA kit, I also ordered a CP2104-based USB-Serial/TTL/UART converter board (6 pin) for programming the ATMEGA from my PC. This part came from ‘buyhere22’ and cost £3.99.

Next up, I ordered 4 CD4046 Phase Locked Loop (PLL) ICs. I’ve been doing a lot of research lately into various types of Tesla Coil drivers and I’ve noticed many Tesla Coils have used PLLs or specifically, the CD4046 in their drivers. So, I will definitely be investigating this chip and hopefully getting some kind of oscillating circuit up and running. The 4 ICs cost £2.59 from ‘mc_manager’.

Lastly, I added to my basket a tiny (thumbnail sized) MP2307 DC-DC buck converter which cost just £1.69 from ‘alltopnotch’. Why I bought this, I’m not sure, but it was mostly out of fascination at such a small board and its ability to step down voltage much more efficiently than a traditional linear regulator. Perhaps I could implement a switching-type power supply in upcoming projects?