"One thing I found through doing all this hardware hacking is that people who wield a soldering iron in NYC are kind of secretive. I mean, they’re nice enough, but they really hold their secrets close to their chest. Take sourcing parts as an example. I would go to meetings where people showed off cool projects they made, and ask them where they get their parts. They would just evade the question, or tell me “digikey”, which is bullshit because I saw some Radio Shack shit in their gear."
In NYC the guys doing physical computing are all "new media artists" from Pratt or Parsons. They are doing their projects with the hopes of getting a gallery show or maybe some contract work making a blinky display for a Macy's holiday window. The levels of desperation and competitiveness surrounding this activity are much higher in NYC than places where Arduino hacking is just considered an obscure hobby.
In contrast, in SF/Silicon Valley the people doing physical computing hacks are all well-paid engineers or programmers during the day and the arduino-artsy stuff is just a hobby. Nobody makes any money off of it and they are happy to share tips. Also, everyone in Silicon Valley already knows that you just buy everything from Digikey. ;)
It's like being a C programmer, and someone asks you - "How do you declare a variable". You could try to explain, but it's not very interesting to answer such basic questions. If you don't even know where to buy electronic parts, you're not even at newbie level yet. You have not even started.
"Where do you get your parts?" is a lot more like "What editor do you use?" than "How do you declare a variable?". It's cool as hell to find a parts shop you never knew existed, or to find a useful component that Radio Shack sells, or to find a website which sells a drop-in solution for what you need.
I’ve actually built a huge number of circuits, read tons of books and learned how to program a PIC basic stamp. I fucking love this shit.
Then:
I had to do my own research and found that, no, these guys get some of their shit from the NYU Computer Store on 242 Greene St near Washington Square Park. It’s obvious since everyone in NYC uses Arduinos and this store has most of the parts I’ve seen them use. That store has an entire section that’s dedicated to hardware hacking gear, including parts, kits, tons of Arduino components, full stamps, everything.
There is much more context and information in the original article. Zed recognized the parts, really did just want to know where the parts came from, and was interested to learn of the parts shop.
Why is this so?