[Raspberry Pi General] fortifieditsolutions:
The most common question asked here is "what should I do with my pi?"

This is a solution to that question. You can now get everything you need to complete the projects we all bought our pi's for.

What I have done is started a subscription box business, with the intention of providing a monthly project for your raspberry pi's. I have tried to pick projects that offer the best combination of improving your tech skills and being something you will use more than once.

I would like to think I have an above average grasp of all aspects of technology and I was worried that I would pick projects that would not be able to be completed by someone with a novice skill level or even someone who has never seen a raspberry pi before.

To make sure that was not the issue. I asked my 11-year-old daughter to help me. This is an average 11-year-old, she does have her own phone, tablet, and laptop. But let's be honest here she spends all her time talking to friends or watching kids open toys on youtube. She is a good student at a small public school. She knows dad makes money working with computers and that’s about it.

I told her I had a headache and asked her to help me. We sat down at the kitchen table with her laptop and the parts I have picked out for the first subscription box. I had her navigate to "https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app/wiki/Raspberry-Pi" and we just walked through each step. I don’t think she noticed that it took almost 2 hours to complete it. When we were done she wanted to keep it in her room. That was about a week ago and every once in a while I can hear her asking Alexa a math problem or something similar.

Sure I was right there beside her to answer any questions or nudge her in the right direction. I think it is worth noting that she had an excellent guide to follow, but we all know that every project most of us want to do at this point is well documented. The issue we have is either lacking the parts to do a project or we have trouble deciding which one we want to do.

A few of the projects I want to add to the coming month's boxes would be things like retropie, a mini magic mirror for the desk, a weather station, some kind of home automation, a time-lapse camera. Functional things like that. Things all ages groups would enjoy.

I don’t want you all to think that I am just getting cheap parts from china and sending them out with a high price tag. What I have done is searched amazon for the parts needed for each project, the first months is the Alexa pi so we needed an SD card. I found some Sandisk 16gb class 10's. we needed a USB microphone. I wouldn’t want the one that is advertised on the GitHub link above due to it not having a cable, so I found a flexible one that would stay where I pointed it at. The last thing we needed was a speaker with a headphone cable, so I got an external speaker designed for a ham radio that had noise canceling built in because why not?

I made sure all of these were 4-star reviews or higher and I also went through all of the comments till I seen that each product I picked was going to work with raspberry pi without issue. Then once I received them I plugged them into all of my pi's to make sure they worked across the raspberry pi family.

While I am positive that most any person out there could come up with some fancy marketing and pretty boxes. I am not that creative. I am offering my passion as a raspberry pi enthusiast. I would not put anything in the boxes that I wouldn’t use myself. I don’t like buying cheap things I am more of a buy it for life type of guy. I stay current on the new uses for raspberry pi and I will always make sure that whatever the project is that month that the instructions are clear enough for anyone capable of reading English to follow.

The price of the box itself is $50.00 per month.

This is the only thing that I am not 100% sure of but I wanted to be prepared for those of us from the UK and other countries. I couldn't figure out a good way of doing the shipping for just you on crate joy's website. I decided a flat rate of $50.00 would guarantee regardless of total weight that I could ship oversea's. I am not happy about this and it will change as soon as I can find a way to handle it properly with cratejoy.

cratejoy.com/subscription-box/fortified-it-solutions/

That’s the link to get your subscriptions started. I don’t have any discount codes or anything at this time. Cratejoy has a refer a friend link where both parties receive $5.00 after they spend $30.00 and I am sure someone here can figure out how the community can take advantage of that. What I would like to do however is anyone that reads this and subscribe's can PM me and I will do overnight shipping or two-day shipping whatever works out best for you. And then hopefully you will leave an honest review of my boxes either here or on cratejoy preferably both.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome below.

*UPDATED EDIT - its pretty much being demanded by the community at this point that I ship raspberry pi's with each box. I will update the listing on cratejoy to include a raspberry pi zero w with each project. if you would like to receive a different model just request it and I will swap models out for you.