Purchasing a Raspberry Pi

Purchasing a Raspberry Pi can be a daunting task. There are lots of kits on the Internet to choose from, as well as a ton of accessories available. We went to the CanaKit website (http://www.canakit.com) to look over some of the options. For beginners to the Raspberry Pi, we definitely suggest getting one of many available kits rather than piecing together the platform. Most, such as the CanaKit we selected, come with a lot of the things we will need right away, and will save us some money by buying the bundle versus purchasing the individual components a la carte.

The two main CanaKit offerings for Raspberry Pi 3 are the Ultimate Starter Kit and the Complete Starter Kit. The Ultimate Starter Kit comes with quite a few more accessories than the Complete Starter Kit. These additions include breadboards, a ribbon cable, a General-purpose input/output (GPIO) to Breadboard interface card, just to name a few. The price is only $15.00 more for all the additional stuff, so we went with the Ultimate Starter Kit because we not only found it to be the best deal overall, but also were not sure what future projects we may need the additional hardware for. We ordered ours through Amazon for about $89. Shop around, there are other sites out there as well to order from, and if we were in education, there are sites that provide these kits at significant discounts.

The following image is from CanaKits of the Complete Starter Kit, which is a good option if we were looking for all the major components needed in this book at the lowest price:

As for the Ultimate Starter Kit, the following image from CanaKits shows just how much more is included. This is one of the kits we purchased, just so we had more project options in the future: