My hunt for gathering parts for the 8-Bit Computer Project by Ben Eater in my city.

Hey Folks!

This is my first time writing and I feel a bit nervous. I know this is going to be bad since it’s my first blog but I won’t let that stop me

So, I hear you want to start the 8-bit Computer project by Ben Eater, right? Looking for a guide to know where to get the components in Pakistan? If you are, here’s a little help from my side. Let me share how I started:

A couple of weeks ago, I dived into this project without much know-how about the individual components. Sure, I had played around a little bit with Arduino and a breadboard before but never had I heard of things like 555 Timer IC, 74LS273 or anything similar to that. Like most high-school grads from Lahore, I was never introduced to such things so this was a new world for me.

My Search

After going over the complete parts list at Ben Eater’s website I was a bit intimidated at first. So, I fired up my search engine and started looking for each part on the list. I got an idea about the prices but a single site didn’t have every part on the list and the delivery charges also didn’t make much sense for small parts. That is when I decided to visit the old and trusted electronic market of Lahore – Hall Road

The First Visit

Since Hall Road isn’t very far I took a friend and went there to check if they have the parts. I had the complete parts list printed with me. Now was the hard part, I had to show the parts list to every relevant shop. After a few hours, I got to a shop that quoted me the price for most of the components leaving behind a few which too were taken care of after another hour of surveying. After receiving quotes for most of the stuff I went back home.

The Second visit

This time I went there to buy the parts mainly from the two shops that had quoted me the prices a day before. But before going to them I stumbled upon a shop named “The IC Shop”. The name stuck with me and I just went there and showed them the list. Turned out that the previous guy was ripping me off and had mentioned 2x and even 3x the price for most of the components. Naturally, I went with these new guys, and to my surprise, they had almost all of the components on the list except the wire and switch. The switches were easy to find but the wire was not that much.

Hunt for the wire

Now, I had most of the parts but the 22 AWG Single Core wire in 6 colors was not available to me at Hall Road. I visited all of the shops I could and no one had the wire in exact spec. Some had it a bit small, and some a bit large to fit into a breadboard. And nobody had it in 6 colors which was a requirement. So, It was time to improvise!

Finding the wire

After my father suggested visiting Bilal Ganj – a market for electrical wires, We both went there and were able to find the one guy in our entire visit who had a single large wire with 6 individual wires in it that were exactly to our needs. So this ended our hunt for the wire.

Lessons learned

If you are someone like me living in Pakistan and interested in getting parts for the 8-Bit Computer project, I recommend you try to involve yourself in the process of sourcing the parts. The whole point of this post was to guide interested individuals and provide them with the insight that I wish I had back when I had started