Spark maker kit value?

I’m going to be getting a spark, and I’ll need some breadboard components with it; I’m not a total newbie to electrical engineering or programming, but I haven’t bought my own kit yet.

$60 seems like a steep price for the stuff in the kit; I did a quick browse of amazon, and found some other options that look comparable, with lower prices.

I was hoping to get some opinions from people that have either bought the kit, or deliberately didn’t get the kit because of the relative price.

Are there certain important elements of this kit that are not in other typical kits?
Is this kit of particularly high quality, and if so, how important do you feel that is?
If you decided to buy a different kit, what are some tips for choosing the right one?

My opinion, the kit provides a nice all in one value for someone that wants a one-stop-shop way to grab a bunch of components to play with, without having to worry about ordering it all piecemeal from different places with separate shipping charges. And you get a nice case with it as well :wink:

Since it sounds like you are a Maker’s Maker… you might benefit from sourcing all of the parts yourself and getting more components for your dollar, at the expense of your time.

If you end up sourcing your own parts, I would grab some extra LEDs, transistors, an LCD, speaker, more resistor values, and a digital temperature sensor if you are thinking you want to do some temp sensing.

I think it would be nice to share the BOM here from wherever you source parts from so that others can benefit from this. http://www.digikey.com would be my preferred distributor. Amazon may be hard to get everything from one vendor with one shipping charge (or free shipping).

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stevethesquid, my pledge included a Maker kit and I completely agree with BDub when he says it needs some extra parts. A 16x2 LCD or a Digole graphics or text LCD (they have built-in smarts), a breadboard power supply if you expect to power a lot of 5V or 3.3V stuff, some 0,01uf ceramic capacitors for power filtering and for the analog inputs, a few 20K to 50K ohm breadboard mountable multi-turn potentiometers, a DHT22 humity/temperature sensor and I recommend a relay breakout board for controlling AC loads. And if you enjoy RGB LED stuff, get some neopixel strips from Adafruit. Oh, and don’t forget lots of energy drinks! :wink:

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