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Mailbag #5, then Postbag #1

A few parcels arrived this week - it's interesting that prices have recently skyrocketed, as have freight charges, and so I've shut down a lot of my purchases to match.

The so-called "chipaggedon" has meant that some stock is not only not available anymore, but also I see that projected delivery times can be over a year. Naturally the prices are therefore ridiculous.

A couple of years ago I bought a dozen or so STM32 based "blue-pill" boards - which at the time were a cheap alternative to the Arduino Nano clones, even though they were more powerful. The price at the time was around AU$2 - now these alternatives are not so cost effective at around AU$13 (June 2021).

I also bought some "raw" STM32 chips for the Pesky Padauk Programming Project. Those chips (even if you could order them), have gone from around AU$1 in price to almost AU$10 per chip - ridiculous! I may end up de-soldering the non-starters so that I have supplies for the future.

In another slightly unnerving development I also had three orders in the last week cancelled by suppliers, with a 24-hour turnaround on refund, making me think that perhaps there were empty shelves in the warehouse to start with?

Perhaps we'll all be frantically de-soldering in the next couple of years to recover/recycle what we can? Luckily all of my "dead" projects end up in the Bucket of Shame™, and so I have a bit of a graveyard from which to rob!

In the meantime, here is some overpriced useless stuff that not only did I manage to buy, but it actually arrived! In a break from previous form I haven't put any links in because I cannot vouch for the availability of these products in the current climate.