'VE got quite a collection of chips, but they used to be stuck into little pieces of static foam which were in this big plastic bag. If I needed a chip, I had to dig through the bag, looking at every little piece of foam. And I didn't even remember what half the chips were anymore. The problem was just as bad with resistors. They were in a series of little boxes, roughly sorted by value, but rough enough that I had to dig through the box to find one I wanted.

he Amazing EE Binder lays all the chips out right in front of me, with large pieces of static foam mounted on cardboard pages. The chips are sorted by type, and there are paper pages that say what each chip is and where to get the spec sheet. The resistors are mounted in cardboard trays with holes in such a way that it's easy to pull them out and put them in, and they are sorted by value. There are currently two pages of chips and two pages of resistors.

ow, if I need a component, I just open up the binder and pull it out. And if that weren't enough, the binder is portable, so I'm always good to go EEing on the town.