Resources

This is my Living List of Resources that I use regularly and feel are important.

I should say that some links (ok, only the Farnell Element14 one) are what are known as Affiliate Links, which means we get a small commission if you buy from them after clicking my link (at no cost to you). If you fancy supporting our site please click through on those links before you buy anything from them.

Essential Tech

• Arduino
• Raspberry Pi

Tools

• Raspberry Pi Battery Life Calculator

Suppliers

Components

In the UK my two favourites are:

• Farnell Element 14
• RS Components

These two can be absolute lifesavers – if you are in the UK, you can order up to 8pm at night and 99 times out of 100 it’ll be with you the next day.

Following on from these two are:

• Mouser
• Digikey (not a big fan of the website though – c’mon guys?)

If a component isn’t available for either of these 4 sites, I’d generally design it out of the design. There would need to be a very good reason to keep it in.

 Kits

When you are not buying stuff from me 😉 I can thoroughly recommend the following:

• Adafruit
• Sparkfun
• MakerShed

All of these companies are just outrageously good.

Blogs & Podcasts

• Adafuit – a great source of general news from the industry.
• Make – best source of news & tutorials for the Maker Community.
• Raspberry Pi – latest information and forums for the Raspberry Pi community.
• EEVBlog – Dave Jones video blogs, rants and a cracking forum.
• The AmpHour  Podcast – Dave Jones again with Chris Gammel. Essential listening.
• Embedded.fm podcast – with Elecia White targeted at embedded software.

Online News / Information sites

• EEWeb – a great hub of product information, news and projects. Recommend getting on the mailing list to keep your finger on the pulse.
• EDN – good for new product announcements and industry news. Another one to get on the mailing list.
• ECN –  similar to EDN. These are sites are great for getting ideas from the latest chip releases.

Magazines

• Make Magazine

What can I say about Make Magazine? It is simply the main hub and an essential part of the Maker Movement.  I strongly encourage you to take out a subscription to this fantastic magazine either in digital format or both. They will ship to the UK or wherever , it is absolutely worth it.