Adafruit and Russia - why buying without an intermediary is impossible

A number of interesting projects for the Raspberry Pi and Arduino wears are somehow related to Adafruit. But getting them is not as easy as we would like.

Someone, sorry?

Adafruit was founded in 2005 by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer Limor Fried, better known by the nickname Ladyada . Starting with the manual assembly of their own sets for assembling simple electronic circuits (again, of their own design), Ladyada quickly established her own company.

Now Adafruit is engaged in the development, small-scale assembly and implementation of additions to the popular debug boards (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, FLORA, etc.): sensors, expansion cards, adapters and special connectors.
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Also, on the basis of the most relevant platforms, quick start kits are offered, which include a board, all the necessary peripherals and connectors, as well as tutorials of its own design.

In addition, on the Adafruit website, you can find the products of fellow start-ups: Teensy, C4Labs, Pimoroni and others. In general, this online store is good because it can find almost all known motherboards for development. Those that Kickstarter intercepted failed. At the same time, the prices for Adafruit are close to the official ones - they are really low.

We must take! But - not work

When you try to make a purchase, dancing with a tambourine begins. The store does not send to Russia, under any sauce. The blocking occurs at the delivery address, shipping address, at the stage of placing the order.

If you somehow manage to get around this (for example, use the " Virtual Address " or a similar program of other mail forwarding providers), the site will block the purchase due to the use of a Russian bank card.

It is interesting that at the same time the payment attempt via PayPal is blocked if the card is issued in Russia (tobish, for the Russian billing address - the payment address). The same applies to other CIS countries, including Ukraine.

Why?

The official position of the store is twofold. On the one hand, they do not want to get involved in the problems of delivery to Russia. On the other hand, they are trying to help their official distributor.

What would be easier - to overpay a little, but to get the necessary piece of iron in Russia. When checking the catalog, it turns out that some items cannot be purchased from a distributor - for example, Raspberry Pi Zero .

And if you search in other stores, then the desired five-dollar piece of iron goes about $ 20 without shipping, and loses its appeal. In most cases , this happens with all ultra-cheap electronic components and boards presented in the Adafruit catalog.

What to do?

We decided to purposefully help the Geektimes community to purchase on Adafruit. To purchase on this resource, it is necessary to use not only the local shipping address (shipping address), but also the local billing address.

We can bring a package from Adafruit using the " Full support " service. In order to use the service, you must register and add links to the products that we need to buy for you. As well as the number or other comments.

Our operators will make purchases in stores on your links, after which the statuses of all goods purchased by us will be updated in the order.

How to save on purchase

Pochtoy.com suggests to all our readers to use the special ada coupon. It gives $ 5 to the account - which means it reduces the cost of delivery, and makes the purchase at Adafruit a bit more profitable.

A small note - more than 5 items of one position in the package can not be placed. The restriction on batteries works as well - they still cannot be brought.

For delivery, you must choose the "Mail Express" or USPS (if you still decide to order the battery - you must use the "Mist-Sea").