microcenter

In the last 5 years Microcenter has been expanding their selection of electronics tools, kits, and parts.

Actually the Microcenter near me (Chicago), has expanded their selection of electronic components significantly in the past couple of years.

I basically assembled my build with pcpartpicker, selected newegg, amazon and microcenter, then bundled it all up and ordered it.

If you are lucky enough to live near a MicroCenter -- they seem to have gotten good stocks and still have a few kicking about.

I will always remember the original slackware and Wallnut Creek FreeBSD distro cds I could buy from microcenter 20 years ago...

There's definitely some overlap in their inventories but it might surprise you to learn that office supply stores also carry office supplies that Microcenter typically doesn't.

But the MicroCenter near me is always packed.

I bought this from Microcenter tonight, and installed Ubuntu 15.04.

), which are currently $20 at MicroCenter, and a USB shield is $25.

The microcenter one was neat because they actually found the processor I wanted at a local microcenter, for in store pickup, at a hundred bucks cheaper than anywhere else (not a technically crazy hurdle, but really convenient and pleasantly surprising).

I googled around to the pi site, amazon, newegg, (gasp) radio shack, microcenter, etc...

They had updated the model last time I was at Microcenter but still keep that $900-1000 price range, just an updated CPU and GPU as far as I can tell.

One might protest that "PCI is a standard!" but what we have is what we can buy at Microcenter.

Microcenter has a well stocked hobby ("maker" if you like, but I hate that term) section, but I doubt they even sell one arduino a day.

It ain't gonna happen but Microcenter doesn't have locations in many areas so I'd love it if they bought up a bunch of the little Radio Shacks and turned them into spinoff/satellite "Nanocenters" or some such.

Then, round up your engineers, drive over to Fry's or Microcenter, and buy parts and build your boxen together.

Microcenter in Cambridge has expanded their space for DIY recently, and is decent now for hobby-level stuff.

Microcenter is essentially the only one selling half that stuff and they can support like 1 store per major metro area.