Of course, a microcontroller needs other parts to do anything interesting, and you'll want more than the two MSP430 chips the Launchpad comes with as you start to build your projects. All the stuff you'll want to buy can take a real chunk out of your wallet. Electronics certainly isn't as cheap a hobby as programming is. Being a cheap (and proud of it!) person without a lot of money for my hobbies I looked into how to get as much hardware as I could for free. The first thing that came to mind was taking apart the old electronic junk I had laying around to get parts and components.
Broken printers, old outdated cell phones, random gadgets that just don't function anymore, all are great for scavenging parts. With a soldering iron, a clip for use as a heat sink, and some cheap desoldering braid or a solder sucker you can extract components like resisters, leds, pretty much anything you find useful from old circuit boards. You can also get stuff like stepper motors from printers, solar cells from calculators, piezoelectric speakers from greeting cards(!), all kinds of things. The prevalence of SMD components in modern electronics can make this a little tricky, but if you're careful you can manage to get a lot of useful stuff for free.
|Circuit boards covered with components to harvest, and some stepper motors from printers.|
Electronics is a more expensive hobby than software, which is what I mainly play around with, but by being crafty about recycling/reusing old electronics and making use of free sample programs you can get a lot of useful parts for free or cheap. This makes building stuff that much more fun for me!