Arduino Starter Kit REVIEW

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy today we're going to be doing a review of the official Arduino starter kit so if you've been following me for any length of time you know I'm trying to get more into that IOT world start doing more classes again and of course an Arduino and Raspberry Pi and these type of devices are what the cool kids are playing with now so I decided to dive right in and it's a good old geek I went out there and I bought a starter kit now some people may look at me buying a starter kit and say oh this this proves why Eli's not a real computer guy real computer guys would have got out there and bought each individual transistor on their own so that they could have saved money well the reason that I bought a starter kit is because honestly as a real technology professional my time is worth a little bit of money you know I'm not say my time is worth Bill Gates or Steve Jobs type money but it's worth it's worth a couple of bucks and one of the nice things is going out and buying starter kits or people laugh at me for buying dummies books is you go and you pay for this thing but then it gives you everything that you need to be able to jump in and to be able to understand the environment that you're going to be working in so if you've never dealt with an Arduino before you need to know how do you code for an Arduino what does code for nerd we know look like oK you've got all these pins what does that actually do for you and by having a kit then you can just dive in this has 15 individual projects it takes you through a lot of the different capabilities for the Arduino you can go through you can do paint-by-numbers you go oh okay that's how you do it and then you can go from there I personally like the Arduino and this is this is actually an Arduino official Arduino starter kit because again one of the problems we run into when we try to save money especially on things like starter kits is the question is is do you know if the components themselves are working so many times when you're learning a new technology you don't know if you miss coded something or if the hardware you're using is broken so if you go out there you might be able to buy unofficial Arduino starter kits let's say $30 or something but are you sure the transistors are going to work right are you sure the Arduino board itself everything is going to be functional on it there is just a quality control with buying the official thing officially officially that says it's $99 I personally went over to Micro Center and purchased this 485 so honestly when I look at this you get the start so the starter kit comes with all the components that you need for 15 projects including you know including a pretty detailed book that goes into it plus the Arduino board and everything else I got this for $85 so literally for less than I used to charge for one hour of labor back in 2009 I get the entire kit and I can just jump right in so at least for me at least for me that makes a lot of sense if you're interested in this if you go over you take a look at our do we know dot cc they actually have and you can see this is the official Arduino starter kit it goes through it explains everything that you get to do you know get you know your tools loveo meters mood Kuehl mood cues motorized pinwheels so on and so forth so I think overall this is a good product and so we're going to be just doing an overall review of this so you have an idea of if you buy this for yourself what you should expect out of it now before we get into the review we do have to talk about our sponsors because the sponsors are who pays the bills we have cumulus networks cumulus networks wants to know your thoughts on web scale networking fill out their survey and you could win an Apple watch cumulus networks comm /e ly Geist guys build and delivers RAC PDUs ultra quick and as few as five days for standard units made in America hashtag sexy PDUs Geist global calm themed free backup for pcs VMs and Linux all at Azim comm dev Mountain dev mount is a 12-week web development iOS newest design boot camp intend you get a full time job in the industrial earn to code at dev Matta calm ine ine specializes in network training with hands-on labs on-site boot camp sort of focused on delivering the best in online networking courses at I and II comm plick service crew dizer flow data users can determine what traffic's done network who is your gain traffic who is received netflix.com and finally get where data recovery go we're partners with IT professionals to offer their end users debt recovery services and digital forensics find out more Gill we're calm as I always say don't really care if you sum up some down or leave a comment but if you click on a sponsored link below that's what helps pays for classes like this and keeps Silicon discourse calm going so the first question that has to be asked with any kind of starter kit is what is the book like especially especially when you're talking about a starter kit for open source project this is something that I always keep in mind I always take the heart because as I talk about my father was a PhD or I guess is a PhD level engineer and he used to bring home things like electronics projects for me when I was a kid and they were just times like that I'm eight I'm eight what thousands even me right and that's one of the problems you get to is a lot of times when when people create starter like starter books or starter projects or whatever basically they say well well I mean I mean really Eli really Eli anybody with their PhD in electrical engineering will be able to pick this up and understand exactly what's going on right so a lot of times when you're dealing with these starter books they can be really high over people's heads as in yeah if you have a bachelor's degree in engineering you understand what's going on but you know a young person isn't going to understand what's going on or it may just be edited poorly or just very low-quality one of the issues we run into in the open source world is that so many people think Amanda pages it's not just that man pages are good enough it's not like well if you don't have anything else you can use the man pages they look at man pages and go who who would want anything more said a man page man pages are the the best things humanity can write and he sit there like Oh golly right that's a big question you know Arduino being an open-source hardware project especially I think it's since it's a non-profit the question is what does this book kind of look like and I was a little worried honestly when I bought it but I do have to say this is very well done apparently they got some professional writers and some professional graphic artists and all that kind of stuff to create this and it's good just all the way around it's late get out very well it's very easy to read all the diagrams and everything is very easy to understand so I really I do have to say that the book is just very good life you look at it you can crack it open and you can see things so here I mean you can see you can see everything looks very nice everything looks very pretty this isn't just like some weird weird acid Xerox book not only that with the diagrams you can see everything is laid out very well so this shows you the diagram of the Arduino board then you have lines that go to text to explain to you everything that's going on with the Arduino board and why you should care about these specific things as you go through when you look at the projects here they give you the actual view of what the boards what the Arduino board should look like how the breadboard should be set up and then down here they give you the electrical diagram so this is for normal humans to understand and then this down here starts to give you an idea of what you're actually doing so if you go through you'll see the fonts are very nice the color is very nice everything is laid out there there were very few parts in here where I had to scratch my head and didn't understand what was going on there were a couple but you know I mean with a project book this long it's pretty easy they give you like these are the code snippets so they show you and that's the nice part too is you'll see how they how they lay everything out this is all the code for this particular project but they lay it out so ok this is where you set up the integer this is where you set up the long these are where you set up this next backs of integers and so it divides everything out so it's much easier to read and to follow along with so overall I thought the book was just very well done it's just a very very very very well-done book very colorful and that's it's easy to follow easy to read and I think anybody at least with high school education should be able to follow us pretty well now one of the questions that comes up though with it is some people have asked with this particular kit is this a paint-by-numbers kit or do you come out of this really feeling like you know Arduino deal I do you know Arduino now and I do have to say no not really alright once I get done with this video I go to micro Center buy a couple more books basically the is a paint-by-numbers book shows you the Arduino board it shows you the components it shows you how to do things it doesn't in depth explain why you're doing those things and I don't feel like I come out of this with a deep knowledge of Arduino what I feel like I come out of this with is an understanding of the capabilities of what Arduino can do I come out of it feeling like I can implement those capabilities but I don't feel like I have that that deep understanding what's going on basically the way that I would explain it is let's say I wanted to create an Arduino device that based on the temperature would turn on a fan here's the thing I could go through and be like okay so the temperature project is here alright so I've got to take some of that and the fan project is here or the motor project here so I'll take some of that okay so take some of that I'll take some of that and then basically super glue and duct tape something together and it'll work well I think you have to understand in the technology world is there is a difference between making something that's functional and understanding why it's functional so I feel like coming out of this I could create functional devices I don't really feel like I know why they're doing what they're doing like this is like it's like here look here look it does what you need it to do oh wow cool Eli so so explain to me what's going on here it does what you needed to know so that's that's what I would say with the book very well done all the way around it's good for what it's good for but is is paint-by-numbers if you want to get something like more in-depth do what I'm going to do like literally when I get done with this video go over and actually buy buy another book that's going to get more in depth and all the concepts but this this is something that's good you can sit down you can run through all the projects you can see all the functionality you can see whether or not you care about the Arduino is the Arduino the solution for you when you sit there and you're doing all of it you get an idea of what's going on and you can say oh yes this is going to solve my my clients my bosses problems go 300 oh yeah no how do you how do you connect HDMI to this oh you can't oh never mind that this isn't good enough so I think that's that's basically what you have to think about the book so that's my thoughts there so now the question is what do the projects actually look like so I did go through again I did all the projects within the book unfortunately I realized after I did all the projects in the book I should have documented better if you go over to Eli computer guy live Channel and you search Arduino over there you'll see the different Arduino projects that I did and additional Arduino projects that I'll do as I continue so you may want to go over there to take a look at the finished projects I figured I'll just show you some of the components and some of the things that you deal with to get an idea of what you learn how to do with the whole Arduino project book now one of the good things with it is it does show you how to use a display so this is an LCD display that you can connect to the Arduino board and so this is a valuable thing if you're going to be creating IOT devices so that the device can actually tell you what the hell is going on yeh so they show you like they do a magic eight-ball thing we're able to shake the device in the middle it'll show you different messages to pay depending on the the switch that's triggered so that's a pretty good thing along those lines they give you this is like a movement sensor kind of hard to see but basically what you do is you plug this into the breadboard and if it feels any movement of the board itself then it's able to trigger so you get to learn how to how to use something like that shows you how to use transistors in order to use a switch basically a if-then mechanism for being able to turn on motors and that type of thing shows you how to use IC chips again to trigger motors and other types of stuff they give you photovoltaic cells so the photovoltaic cells senses the light around the the Arduino board and then based on how much light is going into the Arduino board that can trigger certain things to happen they show you temperature sensors so this is a valuable thing any-any sysadmin Zout there anybody in data centers this little tiny ass little thing right here mope it might be like the most valuable part of this entire Arduino kit is they have the temperature sensors here and so you learn how to use a temperature sensor in order to trigger things to happen so you learn how to use a temperature sensor so you could either trigger like LED lights a light to go off or if you have an Arduino like a Wi-Fi shield or an Internet shield you could trigger a network event to happen if the temperature goes too high so just this little thing right here maybe completely worth it for any like sis admins out there beyond that it shows you how to use little buttons in order to create physical actions it has a little piezo in order to have like little audio sounds so again we start talking I really do have to say this temperature sensor is for as the most valuable thing in the kit this little 25 cent thing but so if it's temperature goes above a certain level you could have your Arduino start emitting a audible sound so that you know that the server room is now above 90 degrees so you could have you can have an LED that goes off and you could have the little little audio alarm go off that can be valuable too they show you how to use servo motors so server motors can move up to 180 degrees so basically if you want to turn things it's like physically be able to turn switches on or off or basically be able to move to a specific place so they give you an electric motor so electric motors can be used for wheels electric motors can be used for fans but they just constantly spend just they do a 360-degree it's an electric motor what's nice with this is you can set it to go to a specific position so basically you can set it to go to one position or another position or another position so the way to think about is if you're creating a vehicle the electric motor is the wheels for the vehicle to get a go forward and backward the servo would be for the steering wheel to be able to turn left or right so you learn how to how to do that and so these are some of the valuable things they show you how to use LEDs not only do you get to get to play around with multiple normal LEDs but they have a tricolor LED so you can have an LED that can turn to multiple different colors depending on what's what's happening so these are the different projects if you go over and and you take a look at the website they get a little artsy crafty with this crap to be able to every one of them let the negatives out I would say it's like a professional they get a little artsy craft you like love Oh meter right measure how hot-blooded you are basically what this is is a temperature sensor color mixing lamp and produce any color with a lamp it uses light as an input so again this is using the photovoltaic cells in order to change the colors of a tricolor LED motorized pinwheel so you can create a pinwheel but the more important thing here is being able to use a motor so that that's the only like that's the thing is when you're looking at this as a professionals you're looking at this as a professional kind of take these the grain of salt I feel like they kid aside these names and they kid aside what these projects sound like but if you can if you can take away the childish names of the project and realize what they're showing you I think that's what the more significant thing is you know so like the crystal ball a mystical tour to answer all your tough questions basically what the crystal ball is is that's where you add the LCD screen to the Arduino and then you also have that little little motion sensor type thing so that when you shake the Arduino it then goes into a switch where it says cases randomly says cases Eero case once case see two case three case four and then depending on those different cases it will spit out an answer for you so that itself is cheesy but it's more understanding the concept that the Arduino can show you a text display based off of certain you know certain criteria I think that's the more valuable thing to take away from this that's one thing I say with the parts I didn't bother with them but that's where it's like with pinwheels and I don't know they give you all this like artsy-fartsy crap which I didn't worry about there's there's this one thing where you learn how to turn the mote you learn how to turn a motor on then you learn how to reverse a motor using a button and then you use a thing to to be able to increase the speed or decrease the speed and that's all supposed to be connected to this artsy-fartsy crap and yes basically basically I took the motor I connected it in I went okay that's forward that's back that's off as faster that's slower so so so yeah so that that's that's a big thing like as an adult kind of take that kids stuff and put it to the side more what you need to be taking away is what does it mean if you're running a motor for a pinwheel yes the pinwheel is stupid who the hell cares but it might be valuable for running a motor for a fan right again the whole servo thing what they have in there might be stupid but having a servo that literally flips a physical switch on and off I imagine let's say you you have an air conditioning unit in your in your data set and you're in your server rooms not a data center your server room and that air conditioning unit can be turned on and off with a physical switch on the wall so their project in here may be may look stupid as far as a servo is concerned but if you understand a servo can move up and it can move down and it's high torque so it actually has the strength to me will switch up and down then what you realize is oh I can use an Arduino board and when it's when it triggers when it senses that the temperature in a room is above 90 degrees I can have the servo move to a specific position which will then move that lights that switch on the wall which will turn on the air conditioning and then once it goes below 70 degrees I can have the servo move to its original position where it will then turn off the switch on the wall again don't look at it so much from like the kiddie kindergarten stuff look at it from oh that's what that means pinwheel stupid turning air conditioners on and off physically valuable so yeah the projects in all their most of the projects are really good all the way around so now the question is what about all the other electronic parts that come with a kit so it comes to the LCD screen the motor and all that what are the things you get like resistors and capacitors and all that kind of stuff and I do have to say they did a very good job with their their selection of things that they give you they do give you a lot of different stuff now the one thing that I did dislike with this particular kit guess some things the Arduino folks are listening is that so many the boxes in this kit are kind of like these you know kind of like raisin boxes where you open them up and then you have to dump everything out well as you can see I kind of feel like a kid with my Legos again this is this is what ends up happening I would say that if you're going to buy the Arduino kit you may want to go to the hobby shop and buy some of those little little like little plastic boxes in order to put parts in because if you don't do that this is the mess you're going to get which is kind of weird because this is the oh this is the box they give you for the electronic parts and so the electronic parts come in this very nice little box right so you have the box and then you open the box and then you can get to your electronic parts on the other hand this is the wire box right so all of these little wires your breadboard in order to get to the wires your breadboard oh yeah yep I definitely feel like an eight year old again right you got a dump all these out and they're kind of small and they can drop on the floor as a pain in the butt I don't know why they didn't use more of these boxes so I would say if you're going to be going for the kit definitely buy some of those little little hobby hobby little little boxes or whatever now when you're dealing with this what's really nice is they allow they give you all the parts to build this kind of like little work table thing so you have this piece of wood here on the wood you what you're able to do is you're able to tape down the breadboard so the breadboard allows you to be able to stick electronic components in without having to solder them down and then you're able to screw in the Arduino board so it's really nice here as you can see these wires did I sparked with the wires is there already pre bent so all you have to do is if you want to connect the board you just plug them in as such and it makes it really nice and easy you don't have a lot a lot of wires hanging around and that kind of stuff if you want to be able to plug in like an LCD or something LED all you do is you just slot it into the holes that you need to slide it into so this is a very good kit overall they give you a lot of different components here so with a lot of starter kits what they'll do is they'll only give you the amount of components that you absolutely need what's nice with this is they give you just just a whole pile of components right so you got all these wires here obviously and then like like if you just go and you take a look at my messy little box here we have just piles of resistors so I've gone through all the experiment so far and you can see these are all the resistors I did not use these are resistors I did not use they have extra capacitors for you they have extra diodes for you they have just a crap ton of LEDs you can see that in here so they have all these different things they have the number of different photovoltaic sensors so even though you only need like one at a time they give you multiple photovoltaic sensors we go over and take a look at the electronic parts the same things true I mean they give you they give you like nine of these little push-button switches for whatever reason which is which is a surprising thing they give you the potentiometer you give me multiple potentiometers and all this kind of stuff so overall they give you not only the parts themselves pretty good but they give you numerous parts so when you want to do projects in the future it's pretty easy to do now one of the things though that I did dislike is they did a good job with a lot of components and then just seemed to like I don't know go to watch on others so if you'll notice like the LEDs or most of the electronic components they have very very long legs almost stupidly long legs but then this is a piezo this is a what emits a sound and what you'll notice is this has very very very short legs now that doesn't seem like a big deal except for the fact that when you connect it to the breadboard so when you're connecting it to breadboard you can only basically all the all the dots here are connected in a row but it only goes to the middle so basically this is the divided line this is one side this is the other and so when you go and you you put the the piezo in the problem is is when you connect it onto the board you literally don't have any room for the other connections that you need to be able to connect into so if you need to be a when you're trying to connect the power it's very difficult to try to be able to connect the power around the piezo itself and then there was there was one project in here that I was not able to complete literally because you had to put something under the piezo and like I say just it just falls off like that so it doesn't connect connect very well so that was a weird thing it's a weird choice that this particular size and then if it even if it is a particular size why are the legs that short that was weird then we ran into the prowl with a potentiometer so if you take a look at the potentiometer before I had to screw with it so this is what the potentiometer looks like and if you put it on the board what you'll notice is it takes up an entire side of the board which again makes it very difficult makes it very difficult to put the the the wires under it so that everything connects properly so what I had to do is I kind of had to bend the hell out of mine and so this is one that I was actually using for the project and so when I bend the hell out of mine I could get it so it only takes up half a side but the problem was is that the connectors are not as tight as they should be so sometimes when I was doing projects I would have to push down on the potentiometer in order to make sure the connections everything was actually connected so that was a pain in the butt again it just seems kind of way these these are a little 10 25 cent parts at most so I'm just not sure why they didn't use a 15 or 30 cent part instead of set of these things the other weird thing too is where is a little this is a vibration sensor so basically if it detects a vibration it goes from on to off the other weird saying is if you look in the book if you look in the book it looks like it's a two-prong sensor and that it's half the size of this so when I was trying to find the that kind of vibration sensor it took me like ten minutes because I was digging through this whole box of crap trying to find the vibration Center sensor that they showed me in the book only to figure out hey this is the one thing that doesn't match anything else in the book I wonder if this is a vibration sensor and it ends up being this so overall in a lot of ways this is good so the wires is very very easy for wiring things up most this stuff it's very good this little this little workbench area is very nice but they just did you can step this weird said like you know and you get this with all products they're just we like a couple of just weird decisions like literally these three well this is just this they just need to modify but basically these two decisions because you use up the potentiometer a lot you actually use this quite a bit and so these two decisions just for for an extra five or ten cents literally would have made the would have made the whole thing a lot better the whole experience better but overall overall still still a good kit and it's pretty easy to actually be able to use and configure when you're playing with things that's really all I have to say for the official Arduino starter kit overall I give it a thumb up I give it like a 1 thumb up one thumb to the side it's very good for what you get it's good value but it's not perfect it's not perfect it's got some tweaks with it the project book is good again this is this is very good for understanding the the functionality of their Arduino and getting comfortable building things with the Arduino but it is very much paint-by-numbers by the time you get done I don't feel like I have an in-depth understanding the Arduino I feel like I could go through here and superglue some stuff together I will learn more but that's the thing is it shows you it shows you that you can do things so you get comfortable with the idea that you can do things and you want to learn more but you just realize you will have to learn more afterwards they give you a whole bunch of cool functionality here to really show you some of the cool stuff that it can do again it gives you the LCD it gives you the servo motors it gives you the motors it gives you the photovoltaic cells the temperature so I'm telling you I'm telling wherever that thing is a little temperature sensor I know you think I know y'all think I'm joking I know I'm telling you that stupid-ass little like 10 cent temperature sensor it's probably the most valuable thing from a from a sysadmin standpoint in this whole thing but I give you all these parts so you can go through you can get an idea of how all this stuff works and then if you understand that there are other shields that are available then you can go and you get an Ethernet shield or a wireless shield or an LTE shield or servo shield and I think like that I think that's the only other thing that I would have added to a kit like this is not necessarily a high value shield but so shields basically shields are kind of like boards that go on top of the mark main Arduino board and that's the one thing they don't have any extra shields here so I think that's if I was in the Arduino company I would think about adding a shield just so people get comfortable the concept of a few like oh okay so I took a shield I put the shield on that shield allowed me to do X Y or Z okay now I feel comfortable shield I think I think the lack of shield is the only thing in the kit that you don't get that I think would be a good thing again you'll be a cheap-ass shield a servo shield or something I level $5.00 shield but just so it gets you comfortable like oh yep that's how you install a shield that's how you program for a shield now I feel comfortable shields the shield is the one thing this doesn't really go into it all so that would be the only thing I would add the parts in here we're good enough for most of it again I like the wires so the wires were good the breadboard this whole little work workbench thing was a really good idea most of the parts were good the issues that I came to the main ones were simply ly say this piezo is just I don't understand there and the potentiometer was kind of weird and this is this is the kind of stuff where I feel like I feel like probably whoever was packing to stuff over at Arduino probably I don't know you know it's Friday night they want to go out for a beer you're like oh I really have to put in the right size potentiometers screw it I'll just throw in the ones we have that's where I kind of feel because everything else is done so well it's kind of weird like you've got this with a potential with a potentiometer you got this piezo the other thing like that the weird issue and that's the thing is like with putting stuff on the breadboard is you just run into weird things so this is this is a little vibration sensor so when it vibrates it it goes from on to off and if you look at it in the book if you look at it in the book it shows it as a two-wire smaller device than this so literally I had to spend like 10 minutes digging through the electronic parts trying to figure out what the hell the vibration sensor was and then realized oh this might be it must be it but then what I looked at the book and I plugged this in it's like yeah but that doesn't that doesn't look like what's in the book so that's the thing is there's just a couple of parts a couple of parts nitpicky stuff but you know it's real I don't understand why they just don't spend like an extra 50 cents not the not to have these issues they really are there so that's that's that's really all I have to say for the Arduino starter kit overall overall some and a half we'll give it a thumb and a half definitely worthy I think I bought it from Micro Center for about $85 I feel good with it I feel so good and excited with it I went out there and I bought myself a four-wheel-drive Arduino kit so it's gotta be one of the one of the projects that we're going to be doing going into here it comes with like little sensors it allows you to create a robot car so I'm excited about that so that is with this I do feel like when you when you get done with this you feel like yep I feel I feel comfortable understanding that I can make the Arduino do what I want to do I feel comfortable with the capabilities of the Arduino and I feel excited going forward but what there's gonna be more work but it would be no fun it would be if you could read one book and you understood everything there's no fun there's just no fun there so it's good thing all the way around so with that that's about all I have to say as always I enjoyed doing this video if you want to join the conversation ask me questions having respond to comments or anything else you might want to think about joining silicon discourse comm regardless I look forward to see you in the next video

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 123,370

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy, Repair, Networking, Tech, IT, Startup

Id: z_ADMN8KOTA

Length: 32min 14sec (1934 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2017