Five reasons why I recommend Adafruit Industries (adafruit.com) to people getting started in physical computing:
- Great engineering: their products are just superbly designed, engineered, and built.
- Great curation: they research and test components and tools to offer so you don’t have to sift through 8,000 different kinds of things yourself.
- Great service: they respond to customer requests and orders really fast (minutes, not days).
- Great support: all of their products and kits have excellent libraries and tutorials for how to actually use them in real projects (learn.adafruit.com).
- Great attitude: they really believe in and support open-source efforts and educators.
PS: They didn’t pay me to write this; I’m just a satisfied customer and see how my students benefit from their stuff.