Why is the BOM list over $500?
Is it to build this 400$ synthesizer?
http://seti.harvard.edu/synth/
Also is the list for the lab guide or main book?
There are good reasons these are expensive.
1.The course has 25 different basic laboratory sections with multiple builds and or modifications of builds. These labs cover much of the wide scope of the digital and analog electronics field. This by definition requires a wide selection of parts if your are going to explore all the book has to offer.
2. You are buying just one or a few of each part so you are not getting any volume discount.
3. It is certainly possible in some cases, via substitution or shopping, to find less expensive alternatives to the parts used in the book but....
- If you do this for all the parts up front, it would probably require more knowledge than someone taking the course is likely to possess and it would take a lot of time.
- On the other hand if you do it as you go and only buy parts for a few lab sections at a time then you are going to be paying mailing and handling costs that are likely to be more than the savings you got for all your efforts.
- If you substitute, in some cases, the parts will not be equivalent so you will not be able to follow the results and designs in the text without some modification ( not necessarily a bad thing).
4. A few of the parts are obsolete and being held by just one or two distributors and they are getting top dollar for their efforts ( particularly in the digital section) It would be nice to see
substitutes from the authors with whatever modifications are needed in the circuits and code for those projects.
5. There are a few select parts that are expensive, you could simply forego those projects with little or no loss of education - the current regulator diode comes to mind.
Perhaps someday the authors will organize a kit, (buying in volume) to help bring down the total costs.
Personally, I bit the bullet and bought the whole kit and kaboodle. Except for resistors and caps for which I already have a nice inventory. Probably I could have foregone purchase of a few transistors and op amps as well if I had cross checked carefully, but you can never have too many of those anyway. The longer you wait the more likely that more parts will become obsolete or difficult to find. The total cost was a fraction of what I have spent on my lab and I will be able to reuse some of these parts for other projects anyway - expanding the scope of my laboratory on-hand components.
On the whole, after seeing the size of this 1100 page lab book, the total cost of parts came in on the low side of what I was anticipating.