VOGONS

Tips for storing DIP chips safely

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First post, by Kahenraz

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]I've often been frustrated by trying to store DIP chips. I found that this can be done safely and cheaply with antistatic foam squares purchased from eBay.

This is an example of a 500mm2 x 5mm bit of foam that I've trimmed for 20 DIP-16 chips of Texas Instruments SN74HC595N 8-Bit Shift Registers I bought for a few dollars.

Note that the foam works equally well single-sided as double-sided as the foam itself is very dense and sturdy. The choice is up to you how densely you would like to package them as well as whether to store the lot in small plastic bags or anti-static pouches.

The first image is all 20 chips on a single side. The rest show how compact it can be with the same number of chips on both sides.

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Reply 1 of 4, by Tiido

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I mostly use chip tubes for storage, mainly because I don't have much of that foam but I have lot of tubes from various buys over time.

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Reply 2 of 4, by Kahenraz

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Tubes are definitely the safest and easiest form of storage but they are also difficult to store densely and are also hard to identify as there isn't a lot of room for labels.

Reply 3 of 4, by alvaro84

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I love this foam, I have one single piece of it myself. But when I have a lot of chips of the same type (like common DRAM or cache SRAM chips) I just snap them together in pairs and put them in a HDD box. For rarer and more unique categories (like SID chips) I use RAM packs that used to contain a DIMM or two.

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Reply 4 of 4, by konc

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Tubes for me as well. You can get a couple of different sizes for cheap and they're actually designed for this exact purpose. I do use foam for old cpus with pins though

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