I have some SMD chips at home that I keep in an organizer box, but if I had to store lots of them, it would take a lot of space. Luckily, there’s a better way: SMD Books. I’ve just found out about those on Aliexpress and Banggood, and they store up to 8500 SMD resistors or capacitors in lots of 50 pieces, meaning you’d have up to 170 different resistors or capacitors value in the book.
It can really be convenient for small projects or repairs, and you won’t break the bank as SMD Books only cost $15 to $40 with components and around $8 without any components in order to store your own.
If you want to cover your bases, you’ll probably end up spending over $100 since you’d want both resistor and capacitor books, plus different SMD sizes such as 0402, 0201, 0805, etc… But in the end, if you are an electronics hobbyist working with SMD components, it’s probably a good investment, as it could end up saving you lots of time.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I have one of these with both resistors and capacitors. They are very convenient because you immediately see your available values. I’m only searching in my small bags when I need a different size. However it’s unlikely that you’ll fill your own components there unless you also have component rolls cut to the same length.
I think it could be useful to have one book with many resistor values in different sizes and sorted by value, and another one for capacitors: when repairing a device, you don’t really care about the component size, usually you can use a smaller one if available.
If you have multiple books I’d suggest to put color stickers on them or one with the list of available values to quickly pick the right one.
I have several of these, they are great value. I can’t figure out how they can create them for so little more than the cost of 8500 resistors on a reel. The downside is – how to refill them when various values get depleted? There are invariably a few very popular values that run out while most others still have 50 left.
It might be hard to only order the resistor values you need, but there are some $2 to $3 kit with thousands of resistors such as this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33013502978.html
I searched for “smd resistor reel cut” on Aliexpress to find some of those.
I’ve bought a few different rolls of common valued parts (caps in .1 ,1, and 10 uF, resistors in 1K, 1.5K, etc.) They’ve always been very inexpensive–no more than $2 with shipping for 1K of them. The idea of getting one of these books to fill in the other less common values is pretty appealing. Maybe once I get my secret laboratory built out. 😉
With the popular values buy a stick of 1000 or more from digikey. Sample books like this are expensive from digikey but for common values you’re looking at <$5 for a 1000 in a cutoff tape.
Can you still get the TDK smd inductor, ferrite and cap books?
Have a couple of the smd inductor books left from 15 years ago