Ho Chi Mihn City is the hub for sourcing the materials and tools driving the growing Vietnamese economy. Whether you’re building new, or keeping existing equipment running, the supply chains and service companies aren’t yet in place and the markets of HCMC are the go-to for parts and equipment. Let’s get a little taste of what I saw in my tour of the markets.

Forget Radio Shack: HCMC Electronics Markets

I’d love to have a market like this in my city. The electronics markets are far better stocked than any local store I’ve encountered. One of the first booths we walked past included these waist-high stacks of crates containing reels of SMD passives, boxes of axial resistors, and those are sheets of copper clad sitting on top.

You’ll also find well-organized glass counters full of components like the trimpots shown here. There was another with all sorts of segment displays (7-segment, bar graphs, double arrows, and 8×8 dot matrix varieties are all visible). Elsewhere you can get LED strips of all kinds, and RGB LED panels. Sean Boyce was my guide on this tour and mentioned that once in a while stock will run low at some pinch point and whatever that is will become unobtainable for weeks or months. Even so, what I saw here gave me candy-store-like glee.

There’s some more colorful booths as well. We encountered a couple places that will sell you the name plates for whatever brand you like — Peavey, Panasonic, JBL, Toshiba, Bose, Sony, etc. The second floor of this market has a large laptop repair booth. Those shelves are full of laptop case parts, with logic boards and other add-ons below.

Everyone needs a hacker, and this is the electronics market’s resident hacker. He signals his talent with the blinky examples in the display case (and the LED cube hanging over his shoulder). The gentleman to the right brought in a module for some unknown equipment. That iron is kept hot and the repair began on the spot.

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Source:: Hackaday