Winter is coming, and it’s a great time to start accumulating parts and tools to keep you occupied with projects during the dark and cold days ahead.

Black Friday

We got a tip from Pololu about their planned Black Friday deals, and thought we’d check with some of the other parts suppliers that cater to the hobby market too. Here’s what we found:

• Adafruit Industries Black Friday – Get 10% off of your purchases made any time on Friday if you use the code ‘BLACK’ (12:00am-11:59pm — we’d guess this is Eastern Time) – UPDATE: Get 10% of Monday 11/28 with the code ‘CYBER’.
• Pololu Black Friday – many items are available at a great discount plus extra savings using their Black Friday coupons. Sales run midnight on Thursday morning through 11:59pm on Monday night (Pacific Time, 11/24 through 11/28)
• UPDATE: Sugru – we just got an email about a special offer for this moldable material. Now through December 19th you can get your fourth pack for free using the coupon code: YAYCHRISTMAS

We did hear back from SparkFun. They don’t have a Black Friday deal planned, but they are planning on Free Day 2012 happening some time early in the year! We’ll keep our eyes open for details, but if you hear about it before we do send us a tip.

Make also got back to us. No specific details about Black Friday, but we’re told they have some type of deals in the works.

Digikey and Mouser didn’t get back to us in time for this post.

Laser Cutter Giveaways

Do you want a laser cutter to call your own? Yeah, so do we. If you come up with a really cool project perhaps you can win one. It looks like there’s two contests a contest going on right now that is giving one away to the grand prize winner.

• Build Lounge is giving away a 40W CO2 Deluxe Hobby Laser Cutter to the best project based on light (community votes).
• Instructables – Oops…. we waited too long to post about this one as the contest closed on the 14th, sorry. But chances are good this will come around again. For now, you’ll have to be satisfied at viewing the entries that made the finals.