Electronics - The ELEGOO MEGA2560 R3 Most Complete Starter Kit.

[Music] foreign [Music] hello YouTubers fellow hams well I'm taking a little break from Radio after all the turmoil and over that s2sdx series I'll come back to that um in a few weeks but I want to look at something different and you know what it is from the thumbnail but I wanted to preface this by talking about something else back when I was a kid 10 years old I was making I was wiring up light bulbs and switches and Lantern batteries and making spaceships out of cardboard boxes in my backyard for my imagination you know my dad recognizing my interest in electronics bought me one of these from Radio Shack for Christmas that year 150 and one Electronics project kit now I'm sure a bunch of you just went oh yeah because I know a lot of people have had this I I posted over on the Facebook page a picture of it and as of this morning there was over 101 likes and hearts on it and a huge string of comments of people sharing their memories of having the same thing it was a tech toy um a toy of the the technology of the day that was an educational tool to teach me and my young self about Electronics which it did I spent hours and hours and hours over years actually playing with that Electronics kit um one of the best Christmas gifts my parents ever got me and I'm sure that those of you that had it as as well probably have equally fond memories of it well what's the modern day equivalent what's the tech toy these days that's you know in in the modern technology Realm that's educational for kids of all ages even older folks like me well that's what we're looking at this is from elegoo it's the most complete they say starter kit for the Mega 2560 which is their clone of an Arduino now this was sent to me by a long time friend of the channel Kevin n9iw back there in Fort Wayne thanks Kevin I'm really going to enjoy this thing arduinos are microcontrollers they're put together in a breakout board that makes it easy to connect things to them they are programmable Hardware they're basically a computer on a chip with i o ports that can sense things and drive things uh and a very easy programming environment that was developed as an educational tool the Arduino project is a fantastic project it's been around for years and years and years I've played with it first five six years ago when I built my dueto box rig interface uh and this kit which we'll look at in detail here in a moment comes with not only one of the programmable microcontroller boards the mega 2560 at Mega chip on it um but it also comes with all kinds of additional stuff additional little boards and sensors and and motors and electronics and a manual with um a 223 page manual with a whole bunch of what they call our lessons but their projects to build with it and it's basically to teach you about working with microcontrollers which are in everything you know your refrigerator probably has a microcontroller in it your microwave your TV well some smart TVs have more than that but microcontrollers are in everything they're the current they're one of the current Technologies and this kit is a great way to get started in learning about programming microcontrollers and playing around with electronics in general let's take a closer look at it and maybe build something with it to see how it works well here it is comes in a nice plastic box ES and if we open this up we first have this page here with all of the information on all of the things that come in this kit and there's a lot of stuff their contact information help here their website if you go to their website you can download the manual as a PDF we'll take a look at that in a moment in the kit we have a CD-ROM with presumably the manual and the Arduino development library or program um oh thank you card you're welcome thank you Kevin again okay look at all this holy cow uh this here this is the Arduino itself or the Arduino clone from eligue Omega 2560 R3 um oh man tons of little breakout boards I don't even know what that one is I have to get a magnifying lens out to look at it but uh we have breakout boards Galore okay this is a power supply so USB or other power comes in 12 volts this will give you five volts and um I don't know 3.3 volts so yeah this will give you several voltages out there's things in here that all kinds of stuff to put on the input and output of your Arduino there's an LED Matrix there so you could play around with LEDs there's uh regular components here's a bunch of resistors over here we've got a prototyping board I'm going to open these up to really take a look at them foreign so this is a prototyping board that can plug into the Arduino and you can solder up your own circuitry on it there's a little breadboard in there as well that you could presumably you know just glue on there and use to breadboard components so you could build your projects semi-permanently or permanently there there is so much in here there's no way that I can possibly cover everything I will link to the manual uh down in the video description and if you go there you can you can inspect everything that's in here we'll just take a quick look at a few of the things over here we have regular components regular electronic components transistors capacitors a couple of ICS in there I don't know what those are a bunch of LEDs some potentiometers uh pzo speaker buzzers so yeah lots of regular components in there more breakout boards as a decade counter I don't know I'll have to actually go through the manual to figure out what most of this stuff is in myself this is a fun one this is a sonar transceiver so these are audio emitters and microphone so this this would be used for sonar projects where it'll send out an audio pulse and receive the Echo and calc you can calculate the distance based on that we might play with that this is amazing this is a little a little uh joystick a little four-way joystick it has a knob that you can put on there there you go now you got a four-way joystick that you can use in your projects of course seven segment displays a multiple display and a single display relay um Servo there's a Servo motor nine volt battery for powering things uh there's a CR2032 backup battery is this a real-time clock board oh yeah it's got maybe it's memory it's got a big chip on the back there smaller chip this might be um this might be battery backed up memory I wonder if it says up here on the diagram there's so much stuff in here oh there's an RFID module this isn't that this is a microphone this is a an audio input device hmm modulated stuff that's a 12 volt power brick I thought that there was in here somewhere a LCD display or oh that's an infrared motion sensor that's what that is that's an infrared motion sensor a bunch of stuff's in here some kind of a sensor another kind of a sensor it looks like it's for sensing gases of some type it's got a grid in it up here we got wires connection wires point-to-point wires a ribbon cable for more involved connections a is that a stepper motor yeah I think that's a geared down yeah geared down stepper motor 5 volt DC stepper nine volt battery power connector so yeah all wiring and stuff this is an interesting looking thing it's a PC board with multiple traces on it you know what that is that's a water level sensor so he that would uh sense moisture as it comes up the PC board the resistance would decrease and so you could sense that value ah there it is I knew we had one of these in here somewhere this is exciting too a LCD display uh two or three maybe four line display so yeah just an infrared remote so you could design robotics projects with this you could you could build all kinds of stuff with this you could basically learn how to program the microcontroller to interface with all kinds of things and to manipulate all kinds of things let's take a look at the clone of the Arduino here oh come on there we go so that is the microcontroller Mega 2560. the manual on the CD is in a PDF format which you can also download as I said I put a link in the video description below if you want to download it and check it out ahead of time and see if this kit might be something for you it's a very nicely done manual let's zoom in a little bit there they have all relevant links here as to where you can buy parts um email address for help and then the packing list now this is the interesting stuff here uh this shows us everything that's in the kit and a description of what it is you know and in some cases it's like here gy 521 module one part that's a breakout board for this chip and what is this chip well I looked it up it's an accelerometer so that's a chip that will sense angle and motion LCD module the megabort itself there's an RFID module with a RFID chip so you could set this up to read RFID chips the stepper motor the Prototype board that we looked at and you can see now this is a 200 and I don't know a 23 page 218 page to page 218 is the last lesson so it's quite a bunch quite a bunch of information in this manual this is great let's uh let's pick one now I'm gonna I want to play with that ultrasonic sensor Which is less than 10 here and that's on page 80. so I'll go to page 80. ultrasonic sensor module so here it is this this sends out an audio pulse at a high frequency that you probably can't hear with your ears your cat might hear it and then it picks up the Echo and that the software can time that and and calculate by how long it took for the echo to come back what the distance is component required we're going to need the main board right there we're going to need the ultrasonic sensor module and we're going to need four wires female to male wires uh that's for plugging this into the board um it tells us what the ultrasonic sensor is provides two centimeters to 400 centimeters non-contact measurement that's like 13 feet that's that's quite a distance wow I didn't know it could go that far um the ranging accuracy can reach to three millimeters so it can be accurate to within three millimeters that's pretty good what would you use this for you might use it on the front of a robot so you can tell when you're approaching a wall or an obstacle and you need to know to turn as one example um the module automatically sends eight 40 kilohertz pulses okay so 40 kilohertz is the audio that's way above human hearing so you're not going to hear that your your cat might hear it and wonder what it is um yeah this is written in uh in translated English so the grammar is a little odd if capitalized if the signal back through high level time of high output i o duration is the time from sending ultrasonic Tor tuning so you kind of have to figure out what they're what they're what they're saying there are actually four different language folders on the CD and the English French German and I'm sure that their translations are about as accurate so yeah this gives you a breakdown of what the module does um how it works and there's a timing diagram to show you a trigger input to the module is is a 10 10 microsecond um it sends a Sonic Burst eight Cycles and then uh the echo pulse uh output to user timing circuit so then it gives you back a pulse and I'm I'm sure that's the duration and time between this point and this point that tells you the distance and then we get a schematic on how to make the connections and that's pretty straightforward of the five volt pin to VCC D12 which is one of the digital pins goes to trigger d11 which is another digital pin goes to Echo so this one's going to be d11 is going to be in input mode for reading and 12 is going to be in output mode for sending a pulse and then of course ground um so that's all the connections we need to make to this and then we just load the software here is a visual wiring diagram they include for each of these projects which again makes it very easy to follow so that's all you need to do to wire this up for the test and then the code using the library design for these sensors will make your code short and simple we include the library at the beginning of our code and then by using simple commands we can control the behavior of the sensor I did download the contents of the CD-ROM well just the English folder because that's what I'm interested in so let's go in here libraries are in a separate folder and those are all the libraries that you might need now a lot of these are already going to be included in the Arduino IDE because these are common parts but if not the libraries are here so you can follow the procedure in the manual to extract them and add them to your system and then code and these are organized by lesson number so it was less than 10 right ultrasonic sensor module let's look there they put the library in here as well so you don't have to go hunting for it this is the library that's needed and here is the example code now I will open the code file and we can look at it and here it is uh real simple Okay so let's build this and see it in operation all right uh I wanted to have this anchored on something so I could play with it so I put it on the breadboard so let's hook up our wires uh so red I've got to the five volts so that goes to uh VCC which is five holes in from the end one two three yep five volts all right now I just need to connect the Arduino okay so I've got the circuit built I've got the Arduino hooked up first I need to come in here and I need to set the board and this is a Arduino Mega or Mega 2560 and port okay we set that to the right port and now we will upload this sketch okay there we go this does not have that Library so I need to install the library all right I'm going to extract the library all this into my Arduino so let me go and figure out how to do that under Linux all right so I have extracted the zip file and that gives us this folder which has the library I'm going to right click on that I'm going to copy it and now in my this is under Linux in my home directory there's an Arduino folder and inside of there there is a libraries folder and inside of there is where we place this Library file so I will paste it there we go hcsr04 now the big question is will it sense that without relaunching the Arduino IDE let's see upload yes it did okay it found it it uploaded it it's done uploading uh I'm gonna go here and open the serial monitor ah there we go look at that it's seeing some distance now I put my hand in here 12 centimeters I'll move it closer eight centimeters how accurate is that let's find out I've got a ruler so I'll put this right about there and I'll put my hand at about five centimeters and look at that five centimeters I'll move my hand out to 14 centimeters 14 centimeters on the display 15 16 a little loss in accuracy while my skin is soft let's go all the way out here to 29 centimeters I'm off the camera 29.30 it's working Isn't that cool [Laughter] okay um so here's what's really cool about this whole kit is you can build the individual projects and then you can modify them and you can and you can combine projects and you can learn how to interact with this hardware and how to program these microcontrollers to work with this hardware and build more evolved things so this is the LCD display and I've built it up and I've loaded the default sketch into it which simply displays hello world which we should see in a moment oh okay it was working oh there it is okay yeah the boot up time on this board is a little bit longer so there we go it's displaying hello world and it's counting seconds all right so I modified my print statement down here I'm printing the value and then I'm printing four spaces to clear anything beyond those characters so we don't end up with letters hanging around on the display and if we go back here and I put my hand down okay there's seven centimeters there's 12 centimeters it's bouncing off my fingers so I'm moving my hand in front of the sensor so there I'm four centimeters away six centimeters away nine centimeters away eight nine ten eleven thirteen so it is working now it's reading our it's printing our distance neat what if I wanted to print that in inches well what's the math for calculation to convert cm into inches divide the length value by 2 5 2.54 so I'm going to add another LCD dot print quotes a divided by 2.54 and then we'll put the word LCD dot print inches upload that so I'm four centimeters away from it that's my hand in here are 1.57 inches six centimeters away 2.36 inches nine centimeters away 3.54 inches so I could make an acoustic ranging device that can go up to 15 feet with this so yeah pretty neat this is an excellent educational tool it's it's it's all kinds of fun so there you go the elegoo most complete starter kit for the Mega 2560. there are their clone of an Arduino yeah I know it's a Chinese clone I'm not going to go there and don't bother clinging hate in the comments I'll ignore it um this is what it is and this is what was sent to me thanks again to Kevin n9iw back there in Fort Wayne for sending me this I'll have a lot of fun with it and it'll help me to prototype things going down the road too having all of the uh everything available in one box just makes it easier to sit down and prototype stuff for future projects so yeah if you have a grandkid that's into Electronics or a kid that's into Electronics this might be a heck of a Christmas gift maybe they'll have as much fun with it as I had with that old 151 Electronics kit you know and if you're just interested in getting into programming microcontrollers this is a heck of a kit um pick it up if you can find it as of the making of this video that we're still in stock at the Walmart online store and there's several other sources that came up with the Google search so about 99 bucks I think at Walmart for this whole kit which is amazing I looked up the uh the 150 and one Electronics project kit it was about 30 bucks in 1976 and adjusted for inflation today's money that's about 148 dollars so this is uh cheaper than what my parents originally invested in that 150 and one Electronics project kit and certainly far more capable so yeah that's what it is uh so anyway I hope you enjoyed that and we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video don't forget to give it a thumbs up also if you're not already a subscriber click to subscribe join us on the Facebook channel for discussion about the videos and if you'd like to help support this Channel please click to support me on my patreon page

Channel: Kevin Loughin

Views: 22,453

Keywords: kb9rlw, arduino

Id: -DjAdRnclUE

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022