I received the adabox second box just before Christmas. Its a ton of stuff, I feel I got far more than my $60 worth although of course its stuff they selected not stuff I selected. I did not sign up in time to get the first box, so I can't comment on the first box. I think the first box was something with RGB LEDs, looks interesting.
The second box is "make a robot" with a feather which is an adafruit thing which is a custom arduino with on board bluetooth. It looks extremely easy to me, but I am not a noob to either electronics or mechanics. Its a nice little set, everything you need to mess around with a little robot.
Its "make a robot" in the post 1990s sense of a robot is a homemade RC car with homemade UI. Not make a robot in the pre 1990s sense of its possibly a stationary arm, or its autonomous, or it does something other than be a possibly weaponized RC car. So its a rather basic homemade RC car, OK cool.
Needless to say with the holiday obligations I've done nothing with it other than watch the videos and paw it all over and there's no way I'm going to get to mess with it due to obligations etc until well after the new year.
Everything seems very well selected and packed and looks fun. It looks quite expandable. Somewhere on my cluttered workbench I have a nice IMU/magnetometer/accelerometer I2C board and I think it would be fun to bolt on. It is not maxed out and cries out to be messed with and expanded. Its open loop motors, so I'd like to use a simple IMU board to close the loop so a 90 degree turn really is 90 degrees and so on. Also I could use the magnetometer to discipline the straight line such that its really straight not a curve with a large unknown radius. That'll probably be my first experiment on my own after I complete the official published experiments.
My decades of experience with boxes implies that if a company mostly sells "stuff" and occasionally offers a box or gift basket it'll be a great deal with overstocked items marked down as much as 50%, maybe more, but if its a "gift box company" the prices of the components (perhaps a cheese log or a summer sausage) will be marked UP at least 100% to 500%. So because adafruit is mostly a "stuff seller" and not a "box seller" the box price to retail component price ratio is awesome. There must be $120+ of retail price stuff in the $60 adabox. The thimble being a company focused on selling boxes, I would assume the price ratio will be more like the "sausage and cheese holiday gift box" biz where the box is at least 200% of retail component price. I would be happy to be surprised if thimble is in fact a good value, but observations of parallel businesses implies that would be quite an achievement if they pull it off.
