When you're still in the prototyping or proof-of-concept stage, you're not going to commit to purchasing large quantities of components and you might not even have the budget to get fully assembled boards ordered from a CM; thus, you end up ordering small quantities of all of your BOM components and they'll typically come in short segments of tape designed for use in pick and place machines.

What happens with all of the components you don't end up using though? How do you store all of them?

You can keep everything in the original packaging which works well since the bags typically have the label with all of the component information on it, but even that system ends up being too clunky for my taste. This is an awful huge waste of space.

And that's where this guy comes in:

The enclosure is primarily for storing the short, leftover tape segments, but I suppose you can use it to get parts out one at a time while you're doing some hand-assembly on a project. The overall dimensions of the enclosure are driven by the two things:

• Must support 8mm wide tape
• Must fit inside the small drawers of the Akro-Mils component organizer