360: Cats Love It!
Transcript from 360: Cats Love It! with Ben Hest, Elecia White, and Christopher White.
EW (00:00:07):
Welcome to Embedded. I'm Elecia White, alongside Christopher White. Have you ever been to an Arabian bazaar filled with wonders and magic lamps? Me neither. This week, we're going to talk to Ben Hest who works at Digi-Key. Before we do that, I want to let you know that we are selling t-shirts. It's going to go through the whole month of February. So check out the website and find the link there.
CW (00:00:33):
Hey Ben. How's it going?
BH (00:00:35):
Hello.
EW (00:00:37):
Could you tell us about yourself as though we met at a hacker conference?
BH (00:00:43):
Well, for the first 10 years of my career, I worked as an applications engineer at Digi-Key. But for the past two years, I've been in a group called Customer Insights. I work across the business to try to give focus to the needs of electrical engineers, makers, technicians, basically anybody who specifies or handles parts. That includes working with teams to improve the website, prototype new concepts, and really just trying to improve the experience for customers, anytime, anywhere.
EW (00:01:20):
Cool. Were you a Digi-Key user before you started working there?
BH (00:01:26):
Yeah,...I started at Digi-Key right out of school. So I went to a school, North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota, and we used the Digi-Key catalog to select parts, the Digi-Key website, whatever. So yeah, I was a user before I started at Digi-Key.
EW (00:01:46):
Okay, I am skipping lightning round, because when we asked people if they had questions for Digi-Key, we got a lot. And in fact the whole show probably will just be mostly listener questions.
CW (00:02:01):
We're just abdicating our responsibility entirely?
EW (00:02:06):
Heck yeah. Well, but first we probably should define Digi-Key. How would you explain it to somebody if you sat next to them on an airplane, somebody you don't know at all, and don't have an expectation of electronics background?
CW (00:02:19):
But not me. Because if I'm on an airplane, I'm screaming. And so I won't listen to what you're saying.
BH (00:02:23):
Yeah. So, I've done that many times on airplanes as I traveled to work. So Digi-Key is, everybody kind of has their own pitch, but Digi-Key is a place that sells electronic components. But most people think of things like stereos or microwaves or TVs or any kind of consumer electronics. We actually sell the little bits that go into all of those things. So things like toasters, even toasters have ICs today. And we even carry toaster ICs that literally have a bagel pin.
CW (00:02:59):
[Laughter]. Okay. What does the bagel pin do?
EW (00:03:03):
It's for toasting bagels.
CW (00:03:08):
Is it like a logic input? And then you set it high?
EW (00:03:10):
Yeah, you push the button.
CW (00:03:10):
Or does it output, is it an output?
EW (00:03:13):
No, you push the button for bagel if you have a toaster that has a bagel button.
CW (00:03:17):
Okay. Okay. I'm alright now.
EW (00:03:19):
When I write Digi-Key, it tends to be one word and all lower case except for the first D. Do you use the dash and the capital K?
BH (00:03:30):
Yeah, that's kind of the official way we write it all the time. It comes from the namesake of the original product that kind of started the company called the Digi-Keyer Kit.
EW (00:03:44):
Okay. What was in that?
BH (00:03:47):
That was a kit designed by our founder, Ron Stordahl, who still owns Digi-Key and still shows up in the office, at least pre-COVID he did. Back in the seventies, he built this kit for the ham radio market, the digital electronic keyer. That item sold, but it wasn't exactly going to take over the world. It wasn't the next billion dollar product.
EW (00:04:12):
This is a keyer for Morse code keys.
BH (00:04:15):
Yeah. Morse code. [Affirmative]. Yeah. And since it wasn't particularly easy to get your hands on small quantities of components back then, our founder ended up buying larger quantities and selling the surplus from building his product in the back of electronics magazines and stuff like that. So it turns out that was a lot bigger of a need in the electronics market. And the business kind of grew from a half-page magazine to a full-page mailer, and eventually a full-blown, 3000-page, three-inch thick, catalog that kind of propped up monitors everywhere.
CW (00:04:53):
That's amazing. I didn't know that.
EW (00:04:55):
What was his day job when he was -
CW (00:04:57):
Yeah
EW (00:04:57):
I mean, because the whole Digi-Key, ham doesn't sound like a product.
BH (00:05:05):
He was a PhD EE student and stuff back in those times. And I'm not sure exactly where he made that transition, but, yeah.
CW (00:05:14):
God, I probably saw that when my dad was into ham radio in the early eighties and stuff, that's amazing. It reminds me of stories of Amazon, sort of, and eBay, where both companies started as something that they didn't intend to turn into, or they started as completely different from what they turned into. That's cool.
EW (00:05:36):
Okay. So now the lightning round-like questions from our listening audience. What is the oddest part Digi-Key stocks? Please say an elephant, please say an elephant.
CW (00:05:46):
[Laughter]. An elephant.
BH (00:05:48):
I mean, we sell welding helmets, and these gigantic brass sledgehammers that I'm not even -
CW (00:05:57):
[Laughter]. What are the sledgehammers for?
BH (00:05:59):
We sell them, I guess.
EW (00:06:00):
[Laughter].
EW (00:06:02):
Haven't you ever used a gigantic brass sledgehammer on your hardware? Or haven't you ever wanted to do?
CW (00:06:08):
I've wanted to. I don't think I have, no.
BH (00:06:10):
I suspect that's probably a good use for that.
EW (00:06:13):
Okay. Do you personally have a favorite component?
BH (00:06:18):
I have a weird component I like. It's a current-limiting diode. Even if it has a namesake of diode, it's not really a diode, but it's this neat little thing you can put in series with LEDs and other things. It's a 2-pin device that limits current, but also lets you put kind of a wide voltage range on the outside of it. It's weird, a lot of people don't know about it, and I don't honestly know where it's used. I just have this neat infatuation with it.
EW (00:06:49):
Do you get free parts for working there as an employee?
BH (00:06:52):
Yeah, if it's work-related, and things like that, we can definitely, ask for parts, pull parts, get parts in our possession and use them. And there's usually a project or some other fun thing involved with that. We also get employee discounts if we're looking towards personal projects, but yeah.
EW (00:07:14):
Do you know what the most expensive part at Digi-Key is?
BH (00:07:20):
I had to look this one up. The most expensive part Digi-Key stocks is a KUKA robotic arm. And so, there is more expensive parts in our catalog, and they're usually gigantic presses from companies like Molex for making connectors and other things like that. But, yeah.
EW (00:07:41):
What's the least expensive part?
CW (00:07:43):
[Laughter].
BH (00:07:47):
There's a lot of least expensive parts, and it's mostly, I mean, just take your pick with the passives, because that's really where the least expensive parts lie. They...can get down to thousandths of a penny or something like that. They can get really, really cheap.
EW (00:08:09):
Can I buy just one at a thousandth of a penny? How do I pay you a thousandth of a penny?
BH (00:08:13):
Well, that's only if you're buying in large -
EW (00:08:17):
[Laughter].
BH (00:08:17):
But yeah, you can buy one. That's kind of Digi-Key's business model. You can buy one of anything.
CW (00:08:24):
How big is the, so this is not a just-in-time, kind of dropship, sort of operation, right? There's a big warehouse.
BH (00:08:32):
Yeah. Yeah. So our warehouse, as it stands in Thief River Falls, is about, I don't know, 600, 700,000 square feet. And then, we are in the middle of building a brand new distribution center that's about 2.2 million square feet.
EW (00:08:54):
Okay, in football fields, what is that?
BH (00:08:57):
[Inaudible]...real quick?
EW (00:08:59):
[Laughter].
CW (00:09:02):
It's big. It's very big.
EW (00:09:03):
I mean, yeah, it seems big, but...I've never walked square feet.
CW (00:09:10):
Hang on. Football field is 57,000 square feet.
EW (00:09:15):
Okay. So 6.6 million divided -
CW (00:09:19):
2.2 million.
EW (00:09:19):
2. -
CW (00:09:19):
The other one is 600,000.
EW (00:09:20):
Okay.
CW (00:09:21):
So it's 10, 12 football fields for one.
EW (00:09:25):
And a lot more for the other.
CW (00:09:26):
30 something for the other one.
BH (00:09:28):
Yeah. It's definitely a big space. I've taken a tour of it once, and it's a monstrosity. It's kind of awe-inspiring to just look in there and see everything that goes on.
CW (00:09:42):
And is it heavily automated? Are there robots that go and do part picking, or are there people going around climbing ladders and stuff?
BH (00:09:51):
It's surprisingly not all that automated. I mean, we have a ton of industrial automation kind of stuff, in terms of conveyors, and moving packages around. But if you're talking about picking parts, it's a lot of people just walking up to a shelf, grabbing parts, putting it in a bag, and putting it on a conveyor to take it away. It's thousands of people -
CW (00:10:14):
Really.
BH (00:10:14):
- just doing day after day, every day.
EW (00:10:19):
So you said you took a tour, which probably means you can't just wander the warehouse whenever you feel like it.
BH (00:10:25):
Well, I took a tour of the new warehouse. The old warehouse, we basically have to go through it to go to meeting rooms and other things like that. And I sometimes take the long route just to admire and discover new things. You can just kind of walk up and down the rows, or look at shelving, and the diversity of product is just amazing.
EW (00:10:49):
Is it like the last scene in Indiana Jones?
CW (00:10:55):
[Laughter].
EW (00:10:55):
Where there is just a field-
CW (00:10:58):
Is the Ark of the Covenant in your warehouse?
EW (00:11:00):
Yes, actually that's the correct question.
BH (00:11:03):
I suspect not, though, you never know.
CW (00:11:06):
And do I get a quantity discount?
EW (00:11:08):
For Arcs of the Covenant?
CW (00:11:12):
Yes.
EW (00:11:12):
[Laughter]. What is the minimum order quantity?
CW (00:11:13):
Right.
BH (00:11:16):
Would you like a reel of that?
CW (00:11:20):
Yeah, right.
BH (00:11:20):
But yeah, it's pretty amazing. It's shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves with boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff. And then people, tons of people all over the place.
EW (00:11:32):
I have to believe that at some point some pieces fall on the ground. How do you find the small ones? I mean, do you have a special vacuum cleaner that has electronic components?
BH (00:11:45):
I don't think there's an ESD-safe Roomba.
CW (00:11:48):
That's a hard problem.
BH (00:11:51):
Yeah, yeah. But yeah, stuff gets dropped. It's not overly common or overly remote, the chance that it happens. But it gets swept up. It gets thrown away and disposed of appropriately. It doesn't go back on the shelf because we have lots of ESD protocols and other things...We have lots of sensitive parts. They just can't be handled inappropriately at any time.
EW (00:12:19):
There are people who would probably buy grab bags of Digi-Key floor sweepings? [Laughter]. No? Don't you think so?
CW (00:12:30):
It depends on what's in it!
BH (00:12:35):
I would buy one.
CW (00:12:35):
Mostly hair and a 6502 that got lost in 1979. This is a weird question, but Thief River Falls is in Minnesota, right?
BH (00:12:45):
Right.
CW (00:12:46):
So does the weather and winter conditions in Minnesota make it more difficult to do ESD protection?
BH (00:12:55):
Yeah, so I mean it's humidity-controlled.
CW (00:12:59):
Okay.
BH (00:12:59):
And stuff like that. But I mean, there's limits to your ability to control large, large spaces. So everybody in there wears heel straps, and for sensitive stuff they're wearing wrist straps when they're picking and things like that. Everything goes in, if it's moisture-sensitive, it goes into heat-sealed, moisture-sensitive bags. Yeah. There's a lot of logistics to really picking parts, and making sure they stay safe, and then getting to the customer safely.
EW (00:13:33):
It's funny because logistics and operations lately has been more in the news than ever with the COVID vaccines. How do you get good at that? I mean, it's a hard problem, people are like, "Oh, well I'll just send one or two," but when you get to the scale of something like Digi-Key, are there specialists who think about the ordering of parts, or how many people you need to get how many parts out?
BH (00:14:04):
Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have data scientists. We have people who have been in this industry and other industries, we just have a wide variety. Logistics is not trivial at all at the scale we're kind of working at. Being in Thief River Falls, we are in kind of a remote location.
BH (00:14:28):
And we rely heavily on UPS, FedEx, the other carriers, to the point where they fly planes into Thief River each and every day, dedicated just to Digi-Key. They've even gone to the point of converting smaller planes into cargo planes, like CRJ200s, because our runway isn't quite long enough for their normal large planes.
EW (00:14:54):
How late can you drop things off for UPS? I mean, what is your ship cutoff time?
BH (00:15:02):
Our ship cutoff time is 8:00 PM Central, and then people are busily busily working until somewhere between 10 and 11. And that's kind of the major cutoff for getting direct stuff going right to Louisville or the other hubs.
EW (00:15:21):
Do you have to sort where things are going, or do you just drop it all at UPS, and they -
BH (00:15:27):
So we actually have a UPS, and FedEx, and other carrier operations, right inside our building.
EW (00:15:34):
Of course.
BH (00:15:35):
So we do have large package sorters and stuff like that, that kind of help presort that stuff. But yeah, they're sitting right there scanning stuff in and putting them on their trucks. As an order comes in, it shows up at a pick station. A person walks right to the bin on the shelf. The person counts out the right quantity. The order is packed, and it's thrown on a conveyor. For simple orders, it can be on a UPS truck for 15 minutes after someone submits their order.
CW (00:16:04):
Wow.
BH (00:16:04):
So it goes through the warehouse really fast.
EW (00:16:08):
And okay, so what do the robots do? If they're not picking things, what is the automation used for?
BH (00:16:16):
Kind of like I said before,...the automation, there's not really a lot of what you would consider traditional robotics. There is some really innovative conveyoring systems, there are -
EW (00:16:28):
What about counting tape? I mean, if I order a Digi-Reel, how do I know, how do you give me a thousand versus 1,003?
CW (00:16:39):
[Laughter]. That's a good question.
BH (00:16:43):
There's a few ways to do that. I mean, the fastest way is actually just having a piece of paper, or a ruler type thing, that shows the pitch of a part, and how many parts come in that length. And they just set it down on the ruler, and they cut it right at that spot. Yeah. The one interesting thing about that is that parts aren't only registered to the holes on a piece of tape. So tape can actually be different in length in terms of how long any given, how do I explain that?
EW (00:17:28):
Well, I mean, some parts are short, and some parts are long, so you can't assume that there are 10 parts per meter. That's a really big chip, sorry.
CW (00:17:39):
[Laughter]. That's a big chip.
EW (00:17:39):
A hundred parts per meter.
BH (00:17:41):
Yeah. The big thing is, even with the same part and the same kind of tape, if you measure out a length of parts, there is actually a tolerance in how many parts are in a given length -
CW (00:17:51):
Right.
BH (00:17:53):
- of parts. So if you aren't careful the tolerance stackup across long lengths can kind of impact that. So, I mean, we have some internal stuff that we've created to help us verify, but overall it's just a really manual process for the most part.
EW (00:18:10):
I kind of thought there'd be scales. You weigh things, but I guess the tape -
CW (00:18:16):
Give me six ounces of STM32 M4Fs.
BH (00:18:21):
Yeah. I mean, there definitely are scales. There are scales for weighing out things that come in bulk. Connectors, pins, all kinds of other stuff, will come just in loose bags, and basically pull it out and put it on the scale.
CW (00:18:33):
Now you've got me thinking of the grocery store cereal dispensers -
BH (00:18:35):
[Laughter].
CW (00:18:37):
- and the nuts. You just put a bag up and -
BH (00:18:41):
Yeah well, you look at a little connector pin. Those things are pretty microscopic. Their weights are pretty low. And so the scales are super-duper sensitive, and they even have scales with plexiglass covers on them. So the air ventilation doesn't...perturb the measurement.
EW (00:19:01):
Yeah, it's kind of sad when you sneeze and all of the parts go everywhere.
BH (00:19:04):
Have you ever seen an 01005 part?
EW (00:19:07):
No, of course not. My eyes aren't that good. Is it difficult to deal with different sizes of orders? I never buy more than a 10 -
CW (00:19:19):
Yeah.
EW (00:19:19):
- of anything because I'm building stuff for myself, and once it's going off to get "built" built, somebody else does the procurement. But then, I know Digi-Key has to work with that person too, where they're building, where they're ordering hundreds of thousands of things.
CW (00:19:36):
It's hard to optimize if you've got such a wide dynamic range of order sizes.
BH (00:19:40):
Yeah. And I mean, that's kind of what we specialize on though. The entire warehouse is built, and the processes are built, to be able to pick small orders, kind of the history of how we started. We came up from breaking down parts -
CW (00:19:55):
Yeah.
BH (00:19:56):
- from full-size reels, and then offering full-size reels, full-size trays, full-size product. That's not nearly as challenging. It's just the space and size and getting things in a box.
CW (00:20:09):
When is Digi-Key going to become a fab? So I can just send a visual design and have you send me the chip?
BH (00:20:19):
I don't know about that one.
EW (00:20:21):
Actually. We did have a question related to that, and that's, "How can I dropship kits?"
BH (00:20:27):
Oh, dropshipping, I don't know if I could answer that so specifically. But I mean, there are, go ahead.
CW (00:20:36):
I don't really understand the question. So I was hoping Elecia would explain to me what she means.
EW (00:20:42):
Okay. Say I am getting a board built, and I need a processor, power regulator -
CW (00:20:52):
Sure.
EW (00:20:52):
-a bunch of stuff. I need 15 parts.
CW (00:20:53):
Okay.
EW (00:20:53):
To get this board built.
CW (00:20:54):
Okay.
EW (00:20:55):
Now, I can order from Digi-Key, get them all here, make sure they're all in boxes, and put them together.
CW (00:21:03):
Oh, but you mean -
EW (00:21:03):
And then I send them to the assemblers.
CW (00:21:05):
Right. So you need to ship to the CM. Okay.
EW (00:21:06):
So why can't I just ship to the CM?
CW (00:21:08):
Got it, got it, got it.
BH (00:21:10):
Oh yeah. I mean, there's definitely mechanisms to do that. And I think that's something that sales can kind of help you set up where you're going to ship parts and where you're going to order parts.
EW (00:21:21):
Alright. So I just need to talk to someone instead of -
CW (00:21:24):
Poking for the right button?
EW (00:21:25):
Right.
BH (00:21:26):
Yeah. Yeah. I think, there might be a way on the website to, I mean, you can fill out shipping addresses and things like that to dropship. I'm not sure if that's really the question that was being asked though.
EW (00:21:41):
I have to find the question, because it was an interesting one. How would you have taken that question?
BH (00:21:49):
I was interpreting that question as, if somebody wants to build a kit and then let other people order it or send it somewhere else.
CW (00:22:02):
Oh.
EW (00:22:02):
Oh.
BH (00:22:02):
That's kind of how I would have expected that.
EW (00:22:06):
Yeah, I know SparkFun,...I can make a list, and people can buy everything on the list. Does Digi-Key have something like that?
BH (00:22:13):
Yeah, we have lots of different kind of ways to manage lists. The big one is the bond manager. The bond manager allows you to kind of collate all the information you need, add some notes to line items, and put it in for a quote, or a full-on, just pop it in your cart, and make an order. You can also save carts, and share carts, and all kinds of other ways of doing that kind of thing.
EW (00:22:41):
How much, and what kind of support, does Digi-Key have for commercial designers versus hobbyists? It sounds like you started kind of with the hobbyist market, but now it's the commercial professional designer who is more often a customer, or even the bigger companies. I guess the original question was engineering support for the two different paths. What kind do you have?
BH (00:23:08):
Well, I mean, if somebody has a legitimate good question, we help anybody that comes in. If they need technical support, if they need to understand how something works, we have a technical team. There's a variety of ways you can kind of contact us, email or chat or, the newer one is, we have something called the TechForum.
BH (00:23:33):
And so people can go on there, and ask their questions, and get them answered, and they get a lot of eyes on it. And it's pretty much patrolled from our side all the time. So we're pretty responsive. And a lot of questions get answered there.
EW (00:23:50):
Some people have complained about your packaging. Some people love it because nothing ever gets broken, but it can be a bit over the top. Are you thinking about doing anything to make it more environmentally friendly?
BH (00:24:06):
Yeah. I think the teams who are in those logistical areas are constantly trying to optimize, and figure out how to reduce waste, and get more environmentally friendly. I mean, one of the big things we did, as long as I've been here, we've always offered this weird little, this paper packing material to fill inside boxes. It's called the Geami paper or whatever. It's kind of this waffley, it's kind of hard to describe. Cats love it though. Just ask Twitter. Cats love the combination of Geami paper and our boxes.
EW (00:24:44):
And that's friendlier than plastic or peanuts. Aah, peanuts.
BH (00:24:50):
[Affirmative].
EW (00:24:50):
Oh, I missed one of the good short questions. How many things does Digi-Key have in your warehouse, counting individual components on rolls?
CW (00:25:00):
What?
EW (00:25:01):
Is it a billion, 10 billion?
CW (00:25:03):
Within what error?
EW (00:25:08):
I don't know. I just wanted the total.
CW (00:25:08):
What precision are you asking here?
BH (00:25:11):
I mean, we do have an inventory management system, but I mean, it would be on the upper end...of the orders of magnitude you were saying.
EW (00:25:20):
What kind of inventory management do you have? How do you check stocks? How do I know what is on the website, that you really have that many?
BH (00:25:30):
We have a lot of homegrown systems actually -
CW (00:25:33):
Yeah.
BH (00:25:33):
- in terms of software. Because I mean, we still have pieces of software in our system that hold the namesake of DEC. We don't have any DEC stuff obviously, but it's been computerized for a long time. And as far as having correct stock, or numbers, for a specific piece, or a specific SKU, a lot of times that gets resolved in replenishing a particular bin someplace. Because we don't have enough space in any particular picking area, or picking spot, for all of the stock usually. So there's periodic checks all the time for correcting that kind of stuff.
EW (00:26:15):
Do you have an area where most of the things are purchased and then a different area where you only get one order for this a year?
BH (00:26:25):
Yeah. So there's a bunch of products that are different-sized. So...we have large things all the way up to these big server cabinets, which might be another odd product that people don't know we sell. And so we may not ship a ton of those, and those kind of go in bulk loading areas, but otherwise things are pretty readily pickable in general. You may not always have all of them in one spot that you need to pick, so they need to get transferred around. But yeah, it's pretty generally accessible across the board.
EW (00:27:02):
So why do I decide to buy from Digi-Key versus a distributor versus the actual company versus someplace like Future...that wants to come and talk to me? Digi-Key...in all of my career has never sat down and said, "Okay, how can we help you?" It's always been very helpful, but I remember when Future and other companies would come by and want to talk at me.
BH (00:27:41):
That's a complex topic there. Yeah, Digi-Key actually...really has kind of an ethos of letting customers come to us and get help, or get suggestions, or things like that. So we don't go out nearly to any kind of scale of other large distributors, and knock on doors, and bring donuts, and things like that. That's just not kind of part of our ethos.
BH (00:28:11):
But as far as Digi-Key goes, why would people order from Digi-Key? Well, Digi-Key holds stock. I think that's the biggest one. A lot of other companies in distribution, a lot of other ways of procuring product, even going direct, there's long lead times, there could be problems with authenticity of product as well, depending on the source.
CW (00:28:42):
Oh yeah, I've had that problem.
BH (00:28:43):
Yeah. So, you know, Digi-Key, and a lot of the other big names are all part of ECIA, which, basically it's a consortium of distributors that hold standards to authenticity of product. So there's a lot to deal with there, but...we offer just a lot of stock so we can serve just-in-time as well as larger runs...across a variety of industries and types of customers.
EW (00:29:12):
Have you noticed that...it's a bit difficult to get some microprocessors lately?
BH (00:29:21):
Yes. Yes. It has been difficult. The business in semiconductors is just kind of going crazy right now. So there's a lot of constrained supply in ICs, in passives, in other things. And there's a word in the industry called allocation, and that's kind of a nasty word, but it's how manufacturers let product trickle out to a lot of different companies. So somebody's not totally lying down, or totally unable to build any product, and yeah,...people don't like it when allocation comes around.
EW (00:30:08):
I don't think I understand. I mean -
CW (00:30:10):
Kind of like triage, I think.
EW (00:30:11):
Ah, okay.
CW (00:30:14):
Is that right? I think, yeah.
BH (00:30:14):
Basically, so a large company you can't come in and take all the product of one kind of product...Historically there's been a few cases where large distributors that may have already been mentioned, bought up the world supply of tantalum capacitors.
CW (00:30:33):
[Laughter]. I remember that time.
BH (00:30:34):
Great tantalum shortage of somewhere in the aughts.
CW (00:30:38):
Lost me a lot of money because I bought a lot of stock in tantalum capacitor companies for some stupid reason.
BH (00:30:44):
But yeah, they bought the entire world's supply. There was literally nothing. And then started charging 5, 10, 20, times their previous going rate. And it was, yeah, whenever there are market constraints people start to get opportunistic and yeah, it gets tough sometimes.
EW (00:31:06):
Does this allocation process, I mean, does Digi-Key rank near Apple? I mean,...do they talk to the little customers and say, "Oh, you're a startup. You're going to go out of business if you don't get this chip," or is it all about "Anybody who's ordering at least a million, you have to tell us why you're the important one."
BH (00:31:30):
I don't know that. The answer to that.
EW (00:31:32):
Fair enough. What things are you seeing that are difficult to get?
BH (00:31:40):
A lot of microprocessors are getting fairly difficult. Basic passives look like their lead times are kind of climbing a lot.
EW (00:31:53):
And we're talking 20 weeks. Not two.
BH (00:31:56):
Yeah. Yeah. So your typical manufacturer standard lead time might be eight weeks. And I mean in good times, they're usually a lot shorter than that. That's just kinda what they tell you. But yeah, real lead times seem to be climbing up a lot.
EW (00:32:15):
Do you have advice for people? I mean, should I start hoarding my parts now?
BH (00:32:20):
I mean...there's a lot of opportunistic buying going on, but there's also just a lot of manufacturing going on. The manufacturing worldwide is just kind of going wild right now. Design in parts that can be crossed. I mean, that's really the best inoculation against part availability.
EW (00:32:45):
So design in things that have multiple suppliers.
BH (00:32:49):
Yeah, yeah. Multiple suppliers, definitely.
CW (00:32:50):
It's tough for micros.
EW (00:32:53):
Yeah.
BH (00:32:55):
Yeah. I mean, a lot of microcontroller companies have really good footprint compatibility across a bunch of their models and lines. But if you're stuck at the top end, if you have some ST part with 512 kilobytes of flash, you're probably out of luck on some of those.
CW (00:33:16):
Or...you just have to change companies in which case -
BH (00:33:18):
Yeah.
CW (00:33:18):
- everything's got to change from your firmware to your hardware.
EW (00:33:24):
And it's been the demand that increased, not necessarily the supply that decreased.
BH (00:33:29):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who knows with COVID and all the supply chain-related things earlier. I mean, that probably limited supply a little bit earlier...last year, but overall demand is just, it's very, very high. Yeah.
EW (00:33:48):
Am I the only one who thinks that's really strange?
BH (00:33:51):
No.
EW (00:33:51):
I just don't really understand electronics. Let's just go with that.
BH (00:33:57):
Yeah. I mean, there's even big manufacturers right now that are idling plants, automotive manufacturers that are idling plants,...but it definitely constrains the ability for some of the economy to work.
CW (00:34:11):
It seems like at some point increased production will come online because that's the way it's supposed to work, but it takes a long time...
BH (00:34:18):
Yeah.
CW (00:34:18):
There's not a lot of elasticity in semiconductor fabs.
EW (00:34:24):
Yeah, let me go set up a new fab this weekend. It'll be a pop-up fab.
BH (00:34:28):
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, passives are, I think, even one of the harder ones. There's a lot of investment in building those kinds of fabs and they're cheap parts. And so it's a lot of risk, I think, for a lot of companies to invest in more supply.
CW (00:34:46):
Yeah. And these are all old process chips. I mean, we're not talking TSMC 5 nanometer here. All those micros are still on very, very large processes.
BH (00:34:56):
Yeah. I think even some of the modern micros typically hover around the 40 nanometer process, right?
CW (00:35:03):
Yeah.
EW (00:35:04):
Oh, this is depressing.
CW (00:35:05):
It's fine.
EW (00:35:06):
I mean, it is fine, but I have some clients, I've warned them that I've noticed that it's gotten bad, and -
CW (00:35:13):
If they don't listen, that's their problem.
EW (00:35:15):
But there have been a lot of people I've talked to recently who didn't realize.
CW (00:35:19):
Yeah, I know, that's bad.
EW (00:35:19):
I mean, where do you find out this information? I heard a rumor and then I heard another rumor.
CW (00:35:25):
When you try to order and it says 52 weeks for your -
EW (00:35:29):
Yes.
CW (00:35:29):
- Cortex-M3.
BH (00:35:29):
Yeah, I mean, the other inoculation kind of against shortages is have your orders in early.
EW (00:35:38):
Yeah.
BH (00:35:38):
...You don't necessarily have to pay for all your stuff upfront to get your orders in.
CW (00:35:49):
Yeah. And then people might need to be more decisive about design decisions, like "Which micro are we going to use? Well, we'll decide between the 256 flash and the 512 flash part toward the end when we know how big the firmware is." Maybe you should figure that out now and go ahead and order them.
EW (00:36:06):
Wait a minute, what's this "you don't have to pay for it" that you speak of?
BH (00:36:11):
Oh, there's lots of different ways to kind of handle that one. But, so yeah. Say you're planning on building 1200 of some widget in a year, but you really only typically manufacturer a hundred in a month. You can schedule and pay only for the amount of product that you need in any given month, but still get the related discounts on the larger quantity...for 1200 units.
EW (00:36:41):
...Usually when I buy direct for large projects, there's not only the minimum order quantity, but there's this whole quoting process. And then there is the ship me "subscribe, and save" on chips....For Digi-Key, it's always been like a grocery store. I go in, I get what I need, and leave. But you do have a quoting process, and you do have these support features for larger procurement problems.
BH (00:37:20):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Scheduling orders was just one piece. We do have quoting, I mean, we have large quoting, I don't know the kinds of numbers, but I mean, we run through hundreds of thousands or millions of quotes a year kind of thing. So there's a lot of different support mechanisms to supporting both the small, independent person, a maker, a design engineer, or something like that, as well as supporting larger companies across the board.
EW (00:37:53):
When I go to the website, less so now, but for a long, long time, it was worse than going to Home Depot, because at least when I go to Home Depot, I'm carrying the part I need that's broken, and I can find it, but you don't have a, "Here's my broken part." How do you recommend people get over the sheer intimidation of a parametric search that gives back 5,242 results.
BH (00:38:25):
It's hard. And that's a challenge we're constantly trying to overcome, and help customers just understand the breadth of product that exists, and how to get into any given family, and understand how to search most effectively. I mean,...there's strategies and stuff like that, but a lot of people are specialists in certain areas. Somebody might know a lot about microcontrollers and have no trouble going to that family, but that same person might have to go in and pick an opamp too, and then have no idea how to pick it out. And that's just a really big challenge across the board. I don't know -
EW (00:39:10):
To some extent I want you to have a most popular. Amazon will respond to a search with the most popular items, and then I would know what everybody else is using. I guess that doesn't really make sense. What do you think the most popular resistor is?
BH (00:39:33):
A Zero Ohm 0603 is -
EW (00:39:38):
[Laughter]. Yes. There are a lot of those, aren't there?
BH (00:39:41):
And that'd be my guess.
CW (00:39:42):
Plus or minus five percent.
EW (00:39:46):
Yeah. If you get the minus 5 percent, please, please deliver them to Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
BH (00:39:53):
Yes, yes.
CW (00:39:53):
As someone pointed out, 5 percent of zero is still zero.
BH (00:39:57):
Yeah.
EW (00:39:59):
Do you have a service where someone can post a random picture of a broken part and say, "I need this?"
BH (00:40:06):
Yeah. There's actually kind of two interesting things there. One of them, I kind of mentioned earlier, it was the TechForum. So we have a lot of techs who..., taking images through email, or the TechForum or other methods has been really common over the history of Digi-Key, helping people find a specific part they took a picture of. Or even mates. That's another big one that that's pretty common to help people find for connectors -
EW (00:40:32):
Mates?
BH (00:40:32):
- mates for connectors. Yep.
EW (00:40:36):
Oh, I take a picture, and then I post it to the forum, and somebody says, "That's a Molex, blah, blah, blah. Here's the part?"
BH (00:40:46):
Yep, exactly, exactly. There's one other feature in our Digi-Key app. We actually have kind of a, I'll call it pretty early and very beta-like, but you can actually take a picture of a product, and it will try to identify it using AI, and fun little bits there.
EW (00:41:08):
A product like an electronic component or like a toaster?
BH (00:41:13):
No, a product like an electronic component. And mostly, we were just talking about connectors...They're a source of huge amounts of support.
EW (00:41:22):
So much.
CW (00:41:24):
Yeah. That was a hard problem.
EW (00:41:26):
It's a really hard problem. The pin spacing, the pin width, the pin height, it's just -
CW (00:41:31):
It's all, it's multi-dimensional, and you can't see a lot of it.
EW (00:41:34):
Yeah. And measuring it's hard.
BH (00:41:38):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, our technical staff are just wizards at that. So, I mean, we have a bunch of technicians who are connector specialists. They've worked in and around that industry for a long time. So we have a lot of people to help figure that kind of stuff out too.
EW (00:41:55):
It never occurred to me to ask for help. What are the overlooked parts of your website? What are the ones you wish people knew about?
BH (00:42:06):
One of my personal favorites is the reference design library. It's kind of hidden off in a menu in the header and stuff like that. But it is an area that's been carefully curated to include really good reference design, attaching the metadata of the parts that are included in the reference designs, allowing you to search by specs of, say you need a power supply of something.
BH (00:42:31):
We have a very Digi-Key-like experience in filtering and selecting that way in the reference design library. So maybe you need an AC-DC converter that does 500 watts. Well, you can go find reference designs that are capable of that in there.
EW (00:42:50):
Okay. So I went to the website, and I chose open source MCU platforms. I was tempted to choose power management, but honestly, I couldn't tell you if it was right or wrong. And then I get a parametric search, so many parametric searches. So how much of your life has been using the parametric search?
BH (00:43:13):
A lot, a lot. I used to actually, for about eight years, I maintained a plug-in for a browser for our website that kind of augmented our search as well. So it did some nicey things like doing voltage ranges and other things. And the need for that has kind of waned a little bit because we've rolled a lot of those features right into our website now.
EW (00:43:42):
Okay. So I chose 32-bit and now I have to choose how many DMA channels or interfaces. Do I want CAN? No, probably not. Hmm. Analog inputs, analog outputs, IDE. Oh, I can choose based on IDE...How come there isn't a, "I don't want any of these in my results" for Digi-Key, because sometimes that is what I really need.
CW (00:44:11):
Yeah, never show me Keil.
BH (00:44:15):
That's a fantastic idea. That's definitely something thought about and figuring out how to do so.
EW (00:44:24):
Okay. So eval part number, I look at it, and I haven't, well, apparently this isn't quite as easy to use as I'd hoped, but maybe you and I will talk about how I find the actual reference design. Anyway, what else is on the website that I should know about and don't, which is everything but searching for components?
BH (00:44:51):
Yeah. You and a lot of people. There are a lot of resources. There's even some nice little tools, right? We have something called Scheme-it, which is a schematic drawing tool. That actually has even outputs to programs like KiCad, so you can kind of export little designs that you might've drawn up in there.
EW (00:45:13):
You have your little calculators too. I find those very amusing.
BH (00:45:16):
Yeah. The calculators are, I mean, there are some really simple ones, and some, we just actually, I think, launched a couple new calculators, a little 555 timer calculator, and some other things too. So the other thing that I like to highlight is we have a lot of 3D CAD models, and other things that, those end up being pretty useful to a lot of people.
EW (00:45:44):
Are those the ones that when I find a part, it's in the list of things about the part?
BH (00:45:50):
Yeah. Yeah. It's usually, if there is a CAD model, it's usually on the product detail page, and we have some partners in SnapEDA, and, oh, what's the other one.
EW (00:46:04):
I mean, AutoCad?
BH (00:46:06):
No, Ultra Librarian. So yeah, we have SnapEDA, and Ultra Librarian, and whenever we can, we link 3D CAD models and footprints and stuff directly from the manufacturer as well.
EW (00:46:20):
We got a question from a listener, Lincoln, who wanted to know if you used those, 3D CAD and other documentations, to verify the components sent by the manufacturer.
BH (00:46:33):
Specifically we don't do anything like that. They're more of just a service to speed people's ability to pick out parts and evaluate parts.
EW (00:46:44):
And let's see. Other cool parts of the website...You have a Maker.io. I should click on that. It's all about making stuff, and there are videos, and blog posts. And I know somewhere in here, if I find it, there's a, how to go from, oh, the Startup Survival Guide. How to go from being a small startup to shipping more than 10 of things. Who does this work?
BH (00:47:10):
We have a small team of people who work in and around the maker community. Especially the maker community that is trying to look at bringing their products or things beyond just being a maker project and kind of pushing it into production at variety of levels.
BH (00:47:31):
But we offer a lot of advice on Maker.io. Things about marketing, things about planning, things about just ideation and design. And then on top of that, there's a lot of projects and other things that are highlighted, that are really popular using Maker, Adafruit, SparkFun, Arduino, a lot of other stuff that way too.
EW (00:47:58):
There's a lot more here than I would have expected. Because I hang out at the products page. Marketing, you just said marketing. How do you share with people that you're building more things?
BH (00:48:12):
We do it a lot of ways. I mean, we have your traditional newsletters. Sometimes stuff just gets hidden in menus on the website too. So it is something that we would like to improve on, I think. And we have areas specializing on industrial automation. We have areas specializing on IoT, and several other kind of areas that kind of help people in certain verticals choose parts, or find the types of parts that they need, and learn about new technologies in those areas too.
EW (00:48:53):
Are there any things that customers do that drive you crazy?
BH (00:48:57):
Read the friendly manual? Would be the way I would say it. Okay, so they didn't...find it on page 47 of the datasheet. No, the ones that drive me bonkers is the people who don't read it and get it answered on the first page of the datasheet.
EW (00:49:16):
Okay. Read at least the first page of the datasheet. Does Digi-Key offer advice about kitting? I know that...as small software companies get into hardware, that's a whole new world for them. They just don't grok kitting.
BH (00:49:33):
I mean, do you want to define what you mean about kitting? Because that's actually kind of a loaded -
EW (00:49:40):
Really?
BH (00:49:40):
So, yeah.
EW (00:49:42):
Okay. So for kitting, for me, it's getting all of the components ready to go to the assembly house, and making sure that if I am building 10 prototype boards, I have at least 12 microcontrollers for those boards. And making sure they're all in one place, they're all available. Ideally the things that need to be on reels are on reels for the pick-and-place machine, all that. What else does kittng mean?
BH (00:50:17):
I mean, kitting can go down to the idea of creating a kit. Like the Digi-Keyer here was a kit. You sent a few parts to some individual who's going to self-assemble something, or it could be everything you need just as you described for a manufacturing run. I think the best tool to kind of leverage for what you were talking about was the BOM Manager, and the BOM Manager, we're making lots of improvements.
BH (00:50:50):
We should have some more improvements coming up in terms of being able to manage lists and features that will really improve that whole process, of being able to have extra pieces, and mitigate other problems you run into with getting parts to some other company.
EW (00:51:12):
Okay. What else do you have coming up?
BH (00:51:15):
There is some fun stuff coming up, but nothing that I can talk about right now.
EW (00:51:21):
One listener, Matt, had a very good suggestion. He wanted Digi-Key to make a video on how to find components. And I actually like this idea. For one video, you'd have finding the oscillator for an MCU design, and you'd go through the parametric search, and at the end you would have a list of three and talk about which one you'd choose, and why, and what circumstances.
EW (00:51:51):
And then maybe you have a different video that's about a different component and a different reason why you would follow a different parametric search path. Do you already have these?
BH (00:52:04):
Yeah, actually we do have some of that. We've partnered with Adafruit, and they have a video they do every week called The Great Search. And so, on that, Limor goes through and she basically does exactly what you said. If you're looking for this specific kind of green LED, she takes you along that path of how you find this really nice-looking specific green LED, or oscillator, or other kind of product.
EW (00:52:34):
Thank you, Adafruit. That's really great. Now I don't have to worry about it. Let's see, what else should I ask you about? Are there other interesting things Digi-Key does that people just don't know?
BH (00:52:48):
A pretty common thing that people don't know is, I mean, we do things like custom battery packs or custom cable assemblies, or IC programming. So if you have your hex file ready to go, we will burn it onto a chip.
EW (00:53:04):
What? Really? How do I, okay. I know how to buy a chip. How do I, I have to talk to someone again, don't I?
BH (00:53:12):
Yeah.
EW (00:53:14):
Ah, man, that's the hardest part.
CW (00:53:16):
It's not that hard.
EW (00:53:17):
It's not that hard, especially since they can do the type chat. That's really cool. I mean, cable assemblies, that used to be one of the hardest parts of my job, and now I'm three steps removed. It's great. But programming chips before I got them, that would be really cool. Alright. Most of my other questions involve Minneapolis and Thief River Falls or Minnesota. How far are you from Minneapolis?
BH (00:53:45):
We're about five hours North.
EW (00:53:48):
North.
BH (00:53:49):
Yep. Yep.
EW (00:53:50):
How far are you from Canada?
BH (00:53:52):
We're about 60 miles from Canada.
EW (00:53:57):
I see.
BH (00:53:57):
We're closer to Winnipeg than we are to Minneapolis.
EW (00:54:02):
Is it hard to get people to work there?
BH (00:54:04):
Well we are kind of the biggest employer in the area. Thief River Falls is only 88 hundred people, and right -
CW (00:54:15):
Wait, what? A hundred thousand, right? You meant?
BH (00:54:18):
8,800 people. Yeah.
CW (00:54:21):
Oh, okay, wow. That's very small.
BH (00:54:24):
It's a metropolis. Yeah. So Digi-Key itself, just in this area, employs maybe 3,500 people. And so we have to pull in a lot of people from surrounding communities, surrounding areas. I mean, it's pretty common for people to commute more than 60 miles to come and work at Digi-Key. And here, 60 miles equals 60 minutes, so it's comparable to a lot of people's commutes that way.
EW (00:54:53):
What do you do for fun? It's January now. So I assume it's all indoors.
BH (00:55:01):
Well, I think Chris Svec actually coined this one. I'm into biohacking and psychology. Otherwise known as I have three kids.
CW (00:55:15):
[Laughter].
EW (00:55:15):
[Laughter].
BH (00:55:15):
Three kids, five and under, so my time is pretty limited in terms of fun. It's a joy to be able to, even in COVID times, work at home, and be able to see their little milestones, and stuff like that. So, I mean, I'm pretty thankful to be working here for the past 13 years and then living in this area. There's a lot of great things about around here.
EW (00:55:42):
And Digi-Key is hiring.
BH (00:55:45):
Yeah, Digi-Key, we are looking for people to help us in terms of software engineers...who might be specialists in search or elastic search...We can have some links in the show notes, I suppose, to the careers page.
EW (00:56:03):
[Affirmative]. What's it like being software engineer at a, I mean, it isn't even that Digi-Key is an electronics company. It's a distribution company. And so being a software engineer there, it isn't about electronics, is it?
BH (00:56:24):
That's the cross section of bits and atoms, and a lot of people interact with Digi-Key virtually, so there is a lot of software, a lot of backend kind of stuff, infrastructure, and a lot of people involved with that. And then you get atoms that show up at your door.
BH (00:56:47):
So, I mean, I don't have a long answer to that, but yeah,...we have to be specialists in the product we sell in order to accurately represent it. So, I mean, that, that's one big thing. We have a lot of people here, hundreds of people with technical degree backgrounds in electronics. So it's pretty broad that way.
CW (00:57:11):
What does that look like? Is it mostly static analysis of, "Okay, we got this new part, and we're going to understand this datasheet, so we can," or do people actually like, "Okay, well, let's build something with this and get experience with it?"
BH (00:57:24):
All of the above. When I was in the applications group, I mean, creating getting started guides, making application notes, I even made a dev board with the CC430 product when it first came out. And we sold that as well. So, there's a lot of different things that people here do. And I mean, there's a lot of people here. So we have teams and teams and teams of people who just look through datasheets, and pull that information out, and normalize it.
CW (00:58:01):
Yeah.
BH (00:58:01):
And make it so you can actually use our search. So somebody doesn't put 5 space V and 5V, or even if one vendor rates their maximum voltage or amperage at some temperature, and another vendor rates it at another temperature. We have to find ways to make that known to customers, to our users of the website, so they can kind of use apples to apples comparisons and select product. It's a big job, a huge investment for us.
EW (00:58:34):
Are there any new components you are especially excited about?
BH (00:58:40):
Well, it's hard to not get a little excited about the new Raspberry Pi boards and chips that are out. I'm really curious to see kind of what people do with the new programmable I/O peripherals. And then in a similar vein,...I just realized the other day that we finally have Parallax Propeller 2s in stock, and I've always been [inaudible] -
EW (00:59:02):
Really?
BH (00:59:02):
- Prop 2s or propellers and their adventure towards Prop 2.
CW (00:59:08):
I forgot all about those were coming.
EW (00:59:10):
I didn't think they'd ever really come.
BH (00:59:16):
They're in stock, so.
EW (00:59:19):
And Propeller 2s.
CW (00:59:21):
Yeah, I just ordered a handful of the Raspberry Pi chips.
EW (00:59:25):
Raspberry Pi Picos. The $4 Raspberry Pi chip -
CW (00:59:29):
That's what he was talking about.
EW (00:59:29):
- that's a microcontroller, which as Bailey pointed out, should have been called the Raspberry Tart. Alright. I have just a couple more questions. How difficult was the decision to not ship catalogs anymore?
BH (00:59:46):
I mean, it was tough...It was one of those things where the scale of the catalog and the scale of the number of products that we really carry,...our last catalog had just about 3000 pages. And so we were adding products at a clip, very, very speedily, and the catalog was way out of date before we even were able to ship it, and assemble it, and ship it, and get it out. The other thing that made it a little easier in terms of the decision would be environmental-based things.
BH (01:00:24):
It was a lot of paper, it was a lot of logistics just to get it out. So...it was a tough decision. I kind of lament the canceling of catalogs across a lot of industries. It's really hard to find and discover products as you go through your career.
BH (01:00:46):
One of the best things that I have probably done in my career, is the first year at Digi-Key, a senior engineer and myself, we just sat down with the catalog, and walked cover to cover, page by page, and looked at all the products we carried. And the ability to discover products, and understand really unique products, that was just such a massive help for me in my career.
EW (01:01:14):
I can imagine. That would be really cool.
BH (01:01:19):
Yeah. There's not really a digital, analog to that.
CW (01:01:24):
So to speak.
BH (01:01:26):
So to speak. Yep.
EW (01:01:27):
Okay. One last question. And I'm sorry I have to ask this. Is it okay if I use Digi-Key datasheets, even if I buy from other people?
BH (01:01:42):
The answer is yes, yes. People do it all the time. We sell products, we stock products, and we get sales a lot of products regardless. So Digi-Key's website is a tool to engineers, and it just gets used that way a lot of times too.
EW (01:02:01):
Well, Ben, it's been really interesting to talk with you, and I hope we covered some of the questions that really came out of the woodwork. I didn't expect quite the huge number, the volume of questions, people had when I just said, "We're going to talk to somebody from Digi-Key. Any questions?" And everybody had one. But I think we've gotten through them, and now a question for you, any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?
BH (01:02:29):
Be kind. You can't control how people treat you, but you can really control how you respond to whatever the situation is.
EW (01:02:39):
Our guest has been Ben Hest of Digi-Key.
CW (01:02:42):
Thanks, Ben.
BH (01:02:43):
Thank you.
EW (01:02:44):
Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our Patreon listener Slack and my Twitter followers [sound of phone dropping] for questions.
CW (01:02:53):
I just dropped my phone in my tea. [Laughter]. I just thought everyone would like to know.
EW (01:03:02):
You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a quote to leave you with. No, actually, I'm just going to go with Christopher dropped his phone in his tea, and now he's shaking it out. You should all just have that image for the week.
CW (01:03:20):
It's been a great day. Bye.
EW (01:03:23):
Bye.