40 Great Maker Supply Companies

Every now and then, you just want a list of suppliers that a maker has put together. Something you can browse through and that helps you discover some new sources of cool kits or parts. That's what this list is about -- big names and little names of companies that serve the maker space. Let us know which suppliers you use and love in the comments below. We'll include them in a future edition.

Don't forget to tell your friends about this comprehensive list. 

1. Arnold Grummer’s is everything you need to make paper.
2. Science Toy Maker is a true DIY website that doesn’t sell parts or kits, but tells you how to make stuff. Tons of Tutorials are available on how to make simple, fun projects via the site and YouTube.
3. West Florida Components (New Port Richey, FL) is an online superstore of semiconductors, capacitors, diodes, and those hard to find parts you thought were obsolete. Great learning center and how-to guides.
4. Amazon  You have to search your term under electronics (usually) to get faster, more precise results. For example, if you search “Arduino” under Electronics you’ll pull 977 results from all sorts of merchants along with the trust Amazon rating system.
5. Adafruit (New York, NY) is one of the most community-focused DIY electronics and kit providers in the world of makers. You can’t go far without finding one of Ladyada’s tutorials and comments in some maker forum. Think MintyBoost, Arduino kits, and cool Skill Badges.
6. Electronic Goldmine (Scottsdale, AZ) is the official name on the site, despite the URL being reversed. It is a veritable goldmine feeling, too, as you scroll down for pages of various special offers, rare products, and otherwise fun stuff. You can search by category, too.
7. Electronix Express (Rahway, NJ) says it is electronics for schools and industry. You’ll find oscilloscopes, programmable power supplies and a fat catalog you can download in PDF format. They have a very cool science-related site called Science Purchase with rockets, centrifuges, and chemistry sets.
8. Newark/Element14 is another electronics superstore with hundreds of brand name parts and suppliers.  It offers a logical category breakdown (lighting, sensing, alternative energy, wireless) and has a powerful search tool (lets you pick RoHS compliant right from the start, for example).
9. All Electronics (Oxnard, CA) is home to thousands of electronic and mechanical parts, including DIY kits, LEDs, test equipment.
10. Polulu is a great source for robot kits, robot parts, and they’ll even custom laser cut stuff for you.
11. Modern Device offers Freeduino, Arduino, JeeLabs, sensors and loads of cool, unique kits.
12. Mouser - If you’re not familiar with electronics, then a name like mouser connotes small or cat-like. But the opposite is true; Mouser is one of the largest electronics suppliers in the world.
13. Frys is well known as an electronics superstore, but they are few and far between with actual retail stores. But thankfully, they have a good online store, too. This link gets you straight to the electronic components section.
14. Alibaba is an online marketplace that connects you to manufacturers from around the world, mostly Asia, that can help you source for larger volume parts purchases.
15. Find Chips is a powerful search engine at the component level. If you know the part number, item number, you can search for it and find the major manufacturers for it. The thing I like best is you find other suppliers, too.
16. Surplus Shed is a retail store with 9,000 square feet of surplus in Maidencreek, PA, much of it in the optical and electronic category.  You can expect to find scopes of all types, beam splitters, and mirror blanks.
17. BG Micro – if you cannot find a part here to build your project, it may not exist. BG Micro has a pretty extensive catalog for the DIY crowd. Don’t miss the “Virtual Sidewalk Sale” page of specials where, at press time, there were a pile 500 capacitors for $7.73.
18. Verical is a superstore of electronic components from companies that are looking to move unsold inventory (usually). You can see how many are in stock, search and compare, for common and uncommon items.
19. Reynolds Electronics (Daytona Beach, FL) offers remote control parts, PIC microcontrollers, robotics and more. The store is dated, but appears to work well. It has lots of projects and descriptions of how someone built a project.  
20. Solarbotics (Canada) is one of the top sources for small solar power packs and project kits including the Pum Lantern kit, a Solar Xylophone, and the Mini-Sumo robot.
21. Advancer Technologies offers DIY muscle sensor kits - EMG circuits for a microcontroller.
22. American Science & Surplus has an eclectic mix of hobbyist gear from insect kits (think butterflies and ant farms) to earth science to batteries.
23. Alltronics (Santa Clara, CA) inspires trust with its 100% Ebay feedback rating. With 9,000+ products, they make it easy for electronics and DIY types.
24. Science Purchase looks like a teacher’s dream. They have loads of kits in bulk packs for easy classroom use.
25. Evil Mad Science (Sunnyvale, CA) is rather famous for its fun and unique kits. Plus, they have terrific educational posts on their blog.
26. Marlin P. Jones & Assoc. (Lake Park, FL) is well known for inexpensive soldering stations, but they provide power supplies, high lumen LED boards, and loads of tech gear.
27. NKC Electronics (Weston, FL) is an Arduino authorized distributor and microcontrollers dominates the home page. They do have other electronic and robotics components as well.
28. Sparkfun Electronics (Boulder, CO) is another major player in the DIY electronics world. Their kits and tutorials are famous and comprehensive. If you’re a kit maker, Sparkfun will consider selling your product or kit, too.
29. Unicorn Electronics (Aliquippa, PA) promises board level components at the lowest price. They have loads of specials – web and back of the warehouse type savings.
30. Hobby Engineering is a retail store/warehouse space in South San Francisco. It covers a wide range of hobbies including model trains, electronics, woodcraft, and even doll houses. Lots of hard to find components and fun kits are here, plus the Gift Guide is helpful.
31. Hobby and Engineering Supplies (Australia) offers thousands of products including remote controlled cars, planes, boats, and helicopters. They also distribute the full range of miniature engineering products from the Miniature Bearings store (link from main site). This range includes small bearings, timing pulleys, and timing belts.
32. Jameco Electronics has been around for 35 years and has over 50,000 parts in its inventory.  Based in Silicon Valley (CA), they are also well known for The Robot Store (acquired in 2005). Click the Workshop link to get tech tips on electronics projects.
33. DigiKey is one of the major suppliers to the maker community. Many people check this site before looking anywhere else. They have a BOM (bill of materials) tool that is quite useful if you’re selling kits and buying lots of parts.
34. Futurlec is based in Asia and keeps new products flowing through its website. They also offer PCB design and manufacturing services.
35. Maplin is the UK’s superstore for electronics, appliances, and gadgets.  
36. PJRC (Portland, OR) is the place to go if you’re looking for the Teensy USB development board. The company and site are run by Paul and Robin and it includes lots of info on the 8051 Assembler Tools.
37. NightFire Electronic Kits has PCB (printed circuit board) kits and home to a tutorial on making your own Surface Mount Technology (SMT) PCB.
38. Sphere Research Corporation (Kelowna, BC) is the place for used electronic test equipment. They have a large supply of prime quality electronic / component surplus, too.  
39. LaserBits (Phoenix, AZ) is one of the best laser cutter supply shops. They have CerMark marking solution (hard to find in small quantities) as well as acrylic shapes and cut pieces, metal, leather, and other laser cutter accessories.
40. Super Bright LEDs has lighting components, but also fully built RV, Marine, and Landscape lighting. All LED, of course.

Muckers & Makers: Are You Just Mucking About?

Makers, have you ever been accused of just “mucking about” when working on a project?

Consider yourselves in good company. Thomas Edison employed a team of “Muckers” who could be considered the predecessors to today’s “Makers”.

When inventors are in the midst of a project, it may look like they are just “mucking about” (what other people think of as wasting time or effort). But Makers know, like Edison’s Muckers did, that getting into the “muck” of the inventive process has a purpose and can lead to dramatic breakthroughs.


“The chance for their ambition to work” - Thomas Edison

At Edison’s iron ore mining facility in NJ, his staff worked long and hard on a project to produce bricks that would not absorb moisture; to produce these bricks, they came up with a binding agent they referred to as “muck”. In time, this team of employees at Edison’s labs and factories became known as Edison’s Muckers.

The men who worked for Edison were not primarily motivated by money or fame, but rather by the desire to see their ideas come to fruition. Some of them were inventors in their own right, while others were talented scientists, artists, and craftsmen who pioneered expertise in areas such as film and sound editing at a time when these industries were nascent.

Like today’s Makers, Muckers were inspired by the desire to create, build and improve on theirs and others’ ideas. Consider this list of characteristics of an inventor like Edison (from http://www.edisonmuckers.org/) and see whether any or all of them apply to you as a Maker:

• Not easily shaken by detractors—persistent in their work
• Passionate about what they do
• Willing to go against accepted thinking
• Visionary and intuitive
• Quantitative and analytical—facile with math
• Not afraid of risk
• Tolerant of ambiguity
• Well developed sense of humor
• Know how to unleash own creative spirit
• Not afraid of failure—willing to learn from it
• Can see the creative links to the arts
• Focused on the future
• See the whole problem and key parts simultaneously
• Can sell their ideas to others
• Builds teams with multi-disciplinary skills to accomplish goals
• Document and protect inventive work
• Solve problems from a multi-dimensional viewpoint
  

So, next time someone accuses you of “mucking about”, tell them about Edison’s Muckers -- and remind them that it takes passion, patience and vision to be a Maker.

What We Learned at the Bay Area and Vancouver Maker Faires

The MakerHub table at the Vancouver Mini Maker Fare
with Tiff (volunteer), Victoria, Bill and Shannon (volunteer).

If you look at the date of the last post one thing will be obvious of what we learned: there is a lot more pre- and post- faire work required than we expected for a team our size with all the other day-to-day.  Part of it was setting up for the design contest we decided to announce at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire.  Another bit was getting our newsletter going.

It was also interesting seeing the difference between the two communities.  The Bay Area is definitely a more “mature” maker community.  Based on those that didn’t stop by our table, a large number of the community didn’t see much value in what we are offering.  That said, of those we talked with at the Bay Area Maker Faire, Victoria estimated 1/2 and I estimated 1/3 of the people’s eyes lit up and wished they had available right now what we plan to offer.  For the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire we both thought it was closer to 3/4 of the people we talked with had their eyes light up, even other makers with tables there.

I think part of the reason is that community maturity level.  In Vancouver we found a lot of people didn’t know about local maker/hacker/create spaces, even though they helped put on the faire.  A lot of people were very new to making and wanted to find peers and resources that matched their skill levels.  Whereas in the Bay Area most people at the faire already knew about resources or who to talk with to learn about resources.

Vancouver mirrored my experience in Seattle.  I’m not an electrical engineer and knew no one in the maker/robotics community.  Because of that it took me at least a year to finally get the right connection for 3D printing & related hobbies. (The brainstorm was realizing robotics skills were needed to make a 3D printer from scratch.  The next weekend was a Seattle Robotics Society meeting about 3D printers!) After that I found out there are at least 6 maker/hacker/create spaces/clubs in the Greater Seattle Area.

One of the reason we went to these events was to see if we were on track and make some personal connections with the maker community.  Given the reactions of those we talked with we all had the sense that MakerHub will provide something folks want.  We even had people pause on the way away from our table, turn around and give us their personal business cards because they want to help. (What with the interviewing and such we’re behind on contacting folks.)

Other Announcements

Monthly mailing list: We now have a mailing list that we’ll be sending out a newsletter to each calendar month, sometimes early, sometimes late.  Sign up here if you’re interested.

Faire contests: At both faires we had drawings for an iPod Nano and sign up for the newsletter.  Surprisingly we had as many folks sign up in Vancouver as in the Bay Area, even though the venue was smaller.

Faire features: At both faires we had sheets of newsprint out asking folks various questions.  We compiled those and put them as features on our UserVoice account.  Take a peek and let us know what you think or add your own.  Our UserVoice feedback & support is always available from any MakerHub page.

Design contest: As I mentioned above we’re running a design contest to help get the MakerHub site from alpha quality into beta quality.  The more input we have the better our site will be.  This contest has three $100 prizes for a toy car design.  One each for easy to follow instructions, easiest to assemble and most interesting.

We’re hiring!: Check out our employment page.  Right now we’re focusing on developer types but we are trying to grow in every way.

Last but not least: Thanks again to James, Shannon and Tiff for helping man the MakerHub table at the faires.  If it weren't for you volunteers Victoria and I would have gone mad.

www.MakerHub.com is finally up! Just in time for Maker Faire

After many trials and tribulations, partly around switching domain names and ownership, partly around last minute bugs, www.MakerHub.com is finally live.

This is an alpha version of the site.  There are still known bugs and the feature set we were hoping to have for Maker Faire isn't quite there.  That said, it is usable as a place to enter your projects and allow others to collaborate on them with you.

Because it is an alpha site we have feedback links on every page at the bottom (a floating UserVoice widget).  If you see something that feels odd, let us know! We might have missed it or thought other features or fixes took higher priority.

Also, due to the alpha nature of the site, the number of projects available to view is really small.  At the time of this post only one from our first alpha user is worth looking at: https://www.makerhub.com/projects/49.  So, let's change that!  Start adding your projects.

As the usability increases we plan on doing design competitions to flush out the project offerings.  Things of all levels, like: design a beginner level project that teaches basic led circuitry & motor mechanics to design a hexapod robot that can walk through grass.