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lmpdev

Off topic:

I'm a developer who got burnt out after a few years

I currently work at one of Dick Smith’s former competitors, Jaycar

It’s utterly bizarre working in such a company. The sheer range of backgrounds of the people you work with is immense

I’ve met genuinely top of their field “between grant” astro-physicists and kids who wouldn’t pass Year 12

It’s what I imagine working at RadioShack was like in the States, pre-mobile-phone-shoved-down-the-throat shenanigans

The amount of proper engineering still done sourced with a 50-200% mark up in Australia is insane to me, but must make sense to someone?

Also: the amount of life threatening work some customers are willing to undertake themselves confounds me. Even though I can show countless examples of people within 200km causing their, and their family’s demise

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When I access https://www.jaycar.com.au/ from Europe, I get a 503 on every page (although the website says its a 404: "Great Scott! Page Not Found... It looks like the flux capacitor has overloaded and sent the page you're looking for back to the past.").

The site is just down today (I can attest to this as I’ve been using their site to place orders most days for the past week – and to some degree the past few weeks – and only in the part 12-ish hours has it gone down).

I get a "website down" message, and a neat little space invaders game to play. Quite neat actually, all in a 24kb html file without external dependencies of any kind

Interesting, I can access it from Germany. Maybe your ip is blacklisted or the server has a peoblem with your client.

The site seems “up” but showing the same 404 error page (Back To The Future - inspired) for most/all URLs.

I’m a founder of an IoT product company, and whenever I’m in the middle of a new product build (including right now), I find myself visiting Jaycar frequently over several weeks. I’ve been there every day for the past 3 days. I have two branches within 20 mins of my house. It’s a Godsend. An engineer in Canada I’m working with loves that when he is looking for a part we need for a device we’re building, he can first see if Jaycar has it and if so I’ll be able to get it easily. I use Core Electronics and Mouser quite a lot too but have to wait at least a few days for shipping. Being able to get so many essential items at short notice or on the way to an installation job makes my work so much easier. It seems to be a rarity in the world these days. So, thanks to you and the team!

> Even though I can show countless examples of people within 200km causing their, and their family’s demise

Can you expand on this ? Do you mean their deaths, or some sort of economic suffering?

Dozens of people in Australia die every year from their own 12 or 230V wiring

I actually find 12V worse. People then try to run mains equipment off it with high amperage and correspondingly high heat, causing fire and…

>Dozens of people in Australia die every year from their own 12 or 230V wiring

Do they? Your claim surprised me, so I did some digging:

Not from electrocution certainly, because as of a few years ago [1], there were only about 5-6 unintentional electrocutions in the home each year nationally, and that's all cause, not DIY electrical.

WRT fire, there are 4-5 deaths from preventable house fires annually caused by electrical faults (the leading causes being smoking and cooking) [2]. There is also a further ~1 death per year categorized as "misuse of electrical equipment". It's not clear into which category DIY electrical would fall, but it's not mentioned at all in the report.

[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/2c37bd48-ee08-43d5-be11-f69...

[2] https://www.bnhcrc.com.au/publications/biblio/bnh-5807

This makes zero sense:?

If you hook a 240V appliance to 12V DC it will draw negligible current.

Perhaps you are trying to talk about people using a 12V to 240V inverter to run AC equipment in a car or off-grid, but not using large enough batteries. What-ever, the end result will be a flat battery or blown fuse, so little damage will be done. No worse than any other 12V wiring in a car.

As an electronics engineer in Australia I don’t quite get what you’re saying about proper engineering - can you elaborate?

Are you talking about the markup on parts or how expensive Australian labour is? I assume the former since the average salary isn’t massive and US engineers do better? (Although there are ways, like consulting which is what I do!)

Australian 80's hacker kid, high school dropout, tuning in .. DSE and Jaycar were a constant source of enlightenment for me as teenager. I distinctly remember the smell of the Fun Way 1 Electronics clearance basket, those delightful particle board layouts ..

What do you mean by life threatening work at Jaycar?

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