Last week I ordered a surface mount microcontroller from AVnet for working with a prototyping circuit. It came in the mail today along with a bunch of other components. All is fine, except, well, the packging for this one single component is really intimidating. Look at the pictures below. I’ve put a standard magazine on the side to give you an idea of the size. Can you see what it is?
Turns out to be a surface mount ATmega644, one single piece. Not sure if this is robot packaged or human packaged. Pretty crazy, isn’t it 🙂
Unfortunately, that is typical of how Avnet and a lot of the other distributors package MCU’s. I had something similar happen several years ago on two separate orders of single units. Not sure why they don’t just do a single packing in one of those small, mailable anti-static boxes with anti-static foam inside like they used to do in the old days. I kept trying to find a use for those packing grid things in the picture. I think that at one point I had a bunch of them stacked for propping-up a flat-screen monitor or something.