Have a project that calls for a bunch of 5V relays? Howsa ’bout 132 of them? After a good bit of desoldering, this $10 surplus board from Apex should have you (and some friends) pretty well stocked. Thanks to John Park for the tip!
38 thoughts on “Anybody need a relay?”
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thanks for the tip!
Sounds cool! And the project is……….? :)
Shipping and handling to send to Southern California was $10 – total price at purchase was $20.98
Mine’s on the way. Can anybody speculate what these boards were possibly used for? Sounds like it would have been noisy, whatever it did :)
I used to live overseas (Kenya) and we had a pulse dialing system. They used to take 20 foot shipping containers and pack the entire switching station into it, on racks with wheels (backup batteries, etc.). You haven’t heard noise until you’ve stepped inside one of these tin cans with several thousand relays clicking back and forth!
I guess potentially this could be a similar application.
Awesome, I’m so glad you up and did it Collin, can’t wait to hear what you’re up to. Plasma2002 — Did you know you can go to Apex and save shipping? Provided you don’t live more than $10 worth of gas away and have the time, that is. But it’s a really amazing place to walk around and poke at stuff.
I was looking at the virtual tour page and it definitely looks like a place I would love to visit. Unfortunately, its more than a the $10 gas :)
The only electronics surplus around here is more like an old-style radio shack, just terribly overpriced. Similar relays here are about $2 each, so the $20 price is completely worth it to me.
Just wish there was some kind of junk-house place around here like that I could go walk around for a few hours.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, I do! Ordered. Here’s to switching a boatload of lights!
I just emailed them asking for the shipping costs for 15 of those boards to me in Dubai. If it’s not completely unreasonable I’ll definitely get them. My wife will probably kill me – but what’s more important? Your life or a nice stash of surplus electronics? :-)
During the last year or so I’ve been planning to build a relay computer somewhat like this http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/ .
Now I just have to figure a fast and easy way to desolder about 2000 relays from the PCB’s Maybe a blowtorch will work…
Bought enough to make it about .10 per relay.
Wow, guess i wasn’t the only one in the market =]
Apex does look like a lot of fun to visit in person – maybe I’ll swing by the next time i’m local … k – I gots a lot more more desoldering to do :/
Data sheet: http://pewa.panasonic.com/pcsd/product/sign/pdf_cat/ds.pdf
Awesome, thx….. but does anybody know if these relays are latching or not? The original page link is gone (sold out?), so no help there
These are non-latching relays. 5V coil. 4 form C. 400 mW nominal operating power. 3.5V pickup. 0.5V dropout. 62.5 ohm coil.
Probably the last time I’m stopping by this thread.
If you have any more questions, email me. gizmo2009 at the circuitgizmos web site.
I just ordered 2 boards because $10 shipping on $20 of items is better than $10 shipping on a $10 item :)
I got some of these a couple years ago and they’re great little relays. Downside is that they’re a pain in the arse to desolder. I tried with a solder sucker but it was too slow. Used a hot air gun which was better, but still slow.
My dad used to bring home great stuff like boards full of relays that Western Union tossed. I remember unsoldering those contacts on similar relays and accidentally found that if you hook the coil through the NC contacts to make it act like a buzzer, you would get a pretty good jolt off a couple of terminals which I hooked up into a fake bandaid with two dollops of solder for contacts on my middle finger with the wires going up my sleeve and greeted people in the hallway of high school saying I was running for office. Pretty soon no one would shake my hand. Wonder why? ;-)
My friend wired one up with a mercury switch inside a clamshell case which he had stripped down to bare metal and insulated the two halves wiring them as the “shocker” contact points. He’d get people to hold the box while he pretended to tie his shoe or something and eventually they’d either let their hand lower enough to trigger the switch or just turn it over to see what it was and ZAP! That box took a beating. Our reputation preceded us and the Principal wouldn’t touch it but asked the Coach “Have you ever seen one of those?” so Coach picked it up, got ZAPPED, and put a dent in the acoustic tile of the Principal’s office. You’d think we would have been expelled but the Principal thought it was pretty funny too.
Does that mean that they are sold out?
Despite ordering early and getting a confirmation on this order, I will not be getting the relays.
Poor business practice. Zero chance I’ll ever try to order from them again.
On behalf of Apex I do thank you for the advertisement, however we never anticipated the huge amounts of orders, especially since they have been on our site for 2 years with very little activity. We are a surplus store so we buy stuff on the surplus market, rather than have suppliers. This means our stock runs out on items, which is what happened with these relay boards. I apologize to those who placed orders that we were unable to fulfill and hope you still continue to do business with us.