Tindie is an excellent resource to find niche electronics to help solve a specific need or problem. However, if what you find is out of stock and can’t actually be purchased, it does you little good. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to ensure that what comes up via search is in stock.
Go to Tindie.com and type in what you would like to find. I’ve demonstrated below with the words “pogo pin.” As shown, you get 86 products, which seems awesome. Clicking through, however, a number of them are out of stock as of this writing.
To filter things down to in stock items only, look at the bottom left of your browser screen, and you’ll find a filter option for “In Stock.” Click on this, and the list gets chiseled down to 50 products, all of which are ready to ship. You can also filter by price, which could be quite helpful as well.
Note that this technique doesn’t indicate whether a seller lists shipping rates to your country–though you can always put in a request. It does account for sellers being on vacation, which happens from time to time.
As for where I got the idea to search for “pogo pin,” making sure things were in stock for this AVR ICSP Pogo Pin Adapter Options post was a small challenge. Now that I know where to click, such research shouldn’t be an issue in the future!
