I am a newcomer to electronics design and I'd really like to start fiddling with making my own circuits. I have a raspberry pi which has both I2C and SPI interfaces, and I'm wondering if there's any classes of older equipment that might have these sorts of chips?
I don't have the equipment to desolder or handle surface-mount components properly, so anything I'm trying to take chips from would need to be through-hole.
I have many older computer systems laying around, I'm assuming that due to the prevalence of SMBus that there's likely some of those chips on a motherboard that could be salvaged.
Are there any better places to look for I2C or SPI chips?
Best Answer
After several years scavenging parts, I can tell you that it is difficult to find I2C or SPI through-hole chips... But, many of the devices by themselves have these communication protocols somewhat hidden. One example is the Wii Nunchuk (I2C), SD cards (SPI), some multimeters (SCI)...
My recommendation: start with some of those and then buy a simple soldering iron to scavenge SMD parts, or sample/buy. You will realize that the price of the component ($0.6?) is NOTHING compared to the time you will spend trying to make it work :D