Elegoo Ultimate Starter Kit

this is the elegu mega starter kit and this kit is a bit nostalgic for me and i want to tell you about that before i open it up so when i first got into the maker world i was using the original raspberry pi and i would go online and i would hear about arduino and i would come across articles that still exist to this day and they would say things like arduino versus raspberry pi and invariably there would be some kind of chart on there and they would show that the arduino has two kilobytes of ram and runs at 16 megahertz and then they would show the raspberry pi is a gigahertz and has 512 megs of ram and then they would usually show some form of brand name arduino and they would be like it has less gpio it has less of this and less of this but it's more expensive and i would sit there and think who in the world would want to use an arduino now obviously i understand a little bit more now and this kit is part of the reason why the other thing was that i was listening to a podcast and one of the guys from hack five was on there and he was talking about he made something for halloween and he just sort of said him passing yeah um i just uh wrote a little code and programmed the chip and it does this and i was sitting there thinking oh yeah okay you just programmed the chip and to me like that just seemed like a huge step forward but one day i was on amazon and i came across the company elegu and i decided to order what happened to be pretty much this kit so today i'm going to review it let's take a look put a new blade in my knife here oh sharp all right so this is a mega starter kit this is the most complete starter kit mega 2560 and this is pretty much the one that i bought now for me this is the kit that revolutionized my life by showing me how simple it was to blink an led i said you know no matter what your background is no matter who you vote for and what your political beliefs are there's every single one of us felt that same feeling the first time that we blinked an led and this kit was the kit that gave me that experience and so i'm opening it up with a little bit of reference reference we uh we have the chart showing what's in it we'll be referring to that because they do have a few custom parts that are a little different than are in some of the other starter kits there is a little thank you card here and i actually like this kit so much that i bought several of them as gifts for people over the years and so my amazon history has several orders of this kit there is the the elegoo code which i usually try to go to elugu.com and download and get the latest version of it but this is the cd i do appreciate they put a version number on there so you can find out if you're downloading something that's newer so first up we have the star of the show which is the elegu branded mega board and this board is it's essentially your your standard mega clone but there are a few differences for one thing as i said this one is branded and it also has labeled pin headers which is really nice on the side of the project the generic one does not um it has if you look on the back it's got some branding and it's just just cleaner like you know this thing's gunked up this one has just a nice clean aesthetic to it i'm sure there are a few little improvements that are happening below the surface that are harder to see but this other than key studio i've never seen a starter kit company make their own branded boards so that's pretty impressive going along with that board you have the standard prototyping shield now i really don't use these very often this one is not branded but you have the ability to solder surface mount chips on here you can use it as a prototyping board if you can solder an extra set of headers on here uh you know it's it's pretty cool for prototyping your own project if you have something that you want to turn into a shield form factor and use more permanently and it comes with one of these little tiny breadboards that you could stick on top just for some prototyping that one is not branded either but this one is branded and this is the elegu solderless breadboard they say that it is it has specially designed clips that are made for 5 000 insertion cycles now these are the standard ones that come with other kits and and they're dubious at best julian alette has a video pulling these things apart and testing them for quality but uh elga decided that they wanted to put their name on it and uh and so you can you can tell off the bat this is a harder plastic over here the lines are brighter the labels are clearer um again i i'm not looking at the inside to know the difference between these things maybe we should tear it down but uh it appears to be of a little bit higher quality than the generic one that you're going to get with other kits you have your standard resistor pack which is nice i appreciate that they use quarter watt resistors they feel a little bit better just a little bit easier to stick into the breadboard you have your standard assortment of leds and capacitors and photo resistors got some rgb leds some transistors some little push buttons and other capacitors and passive buzzers and some chips for programming seven segment displays and you've got your 10k potentiometers so this is pretty standard fare for arduino starter kits one of the things that sets some kits apart is the wires and these kind of wires only come in mail-to-mail but i do like when these come in kits i feel like they're a lot better for removing in and out of things the pins don't break anywhere near as easily as this style which they did include some of these because sometimes you need the male to female ones but these ones have a tendency to break off more in the arduino than the breadboard from my experience but they these pins can definitely break off where i've never broken one of these so a little assortment of wires next up you have the rfid rc 522 which is the 13 megahertz uh rfid module and this one is not branded either these things i feel like adds so much of a wow factor to projects like when a kid sets up his first thing with a relayers first thing with an led that's really cool but then when you can sit there and use this thing to magically turn the light on and off that is really cool and that's sort of one of those uh just absolutely wow things the first time you do it and so i always appreciate when this is included in the kits next up we have the 8 by 8 led module that is included in a lot of kits but this one is branded by elegu and it's a max 7219 dot matrix module v02 and so i'm guessing they've done something to it to make it version two but you can see things are labeled the pins are straight it's clean the solder mask looks good the the screen printing looks good everything looks good nice looking module this is your standard 4x4 16 button matrix that comes in a lot of these kits this is different i've actually never seen one of these come in a kit in white which i guess isn't life changing or anything like that but this is a 9 volt 1 amp power supply that is in white and that barrel it looks a little smaller than normal yeah works fine um but that's your standard power brick and that goes with either the arduino or this little breadboard adapter and these things are really cool they have little jumpers here let's see is this elegant branded this is elegu branded and uh they allow you to plug them into the breadboard like so and you can set this rail to be 5 volts in this rail to be 3.3 volts there's some other headers and regulators to give you good clean power you can turn the whole thing on and off and you can put up to 12 volts into this thing so it's nice way to power your projects during prototyping power your projects during prototyping time um and so yeah cool while i'm going through these things the uh one of the things i have to say about lagoon because right now i can tell that as i'm as i'm talking about these parts other than some brand names a lot of them just have this sort of uh you know everybody has similar parts so the reason why i wanted to review this kit is not that the the parts into here are super unique but what is uh i i guess you could say unique is that you know that the parts that are coming in here are generally of good quality and i think if i remember correctly the instructions are of good quality and so the thing about this kit is not that there are magical parts in here that you won't find in any other kit although there are a few but in general you're getting boards that have straight pin headers and quality instructions and was packed well and all of that kind of stuff so that's one of the things i love about elegoo here you've got your standard seven segment display which is pretty common this is a the four four by seven segment display there's also a single seven segment display in here nothing too special here but fun nice to play with what is unique is this ds-1307 module v03 with a cr1223 volt battery on it and this is considered it's oh it's branded by elegu this is considered a high precision uh real-time clock and it also has temperature on it and it says something about having storage now i don't know if there's any storage on that chip or if they mean that the battery uh helps you to store the time but either way this is different than your standard real-time clock module very cool next up we have the 16 by two so that's 16 characters across two rows tall little lcd module and this one they have chosen not to include the i square c uh backpack on it so i think to get this hooked up you need at least eight of these wires somewhere in that range where with the i squared c backpack on it you can you can hook it up with four wires but this one is the one that i had for my first module and i figured it out but it is a little different than in these days they're not including the i squared c module next up we have a stepper motor and the stepper motor controller these are not branded they're your more generic stepper motors that come in pretty much every kit made out of metal uh what do they call that that is a 28 byj 48 5 volt stepper motor this is your standard pir sensor nothing special here but i it's for detecting motion i had this one in my first escape room and what we did with it is uh there was a point where everybody had to stand inside of a a box basically and you could uh if they moved they would get a time penalty and we could do things like shake the room with sound or uh or squirt water at them and different things like that through the room and every time they moved the clock reset that was kind of a fun little thing uh this thing was actually it was sticking through something that looked like an eye so this looked like a giant eyeball sticking out that was kind of fun uh we've got some ir stuff here this is your standard ir remote as well as an ir receiver there could be an ir sending led inside of that thing of leds i didn't see that next up normally there wouldn't be something to say about a 9-volt connector but even this is just a little bit higher quality normally when you see these things they're the kind that have like the flat squishy plastic on them and this actually has a hard shell it's something you can kind of grab a hold of and and stick it in the nine volt speaking of nine volts it actually does come with a nine volt battery i don't know who the joker is that runs this company uh sam shing but that guy has got to be rich because i see these batteries all over the place so mr powerful cell whoever your sales people are are fantastic because you get these batteries in a lot of different places we have your standard 5 volt high speed motor with the little fan flower looking thingy that you can put on top of it for input we have two modules neither one of them is branded but this is the your standard joystick with the little clicky thingy on it and so basically resistors uh tell you what direction you're pointing can be used for a lot of uh input type things and similarly we have the rotary encoder which is similar to what is in a lot of car stereos where you can just keep turning and eventually the volume will just stop or you can keep turning this direction or you can click this for different settings i've used these a few times in little menu systems and stuff with these 16 by two screens you have a standalone relay here which is normally attached to some form of module but in this situation they gave you the uh just your bare relay i wouldn't recommend hooking that up to ac just plugging it in your breadboard but for you know your little dc uh projects that could be fun to learn how to use a relay have a standard microphone module nothing too special there uh some servos or a servo with your standard little attachment things that you can do accessories on top of your servo this is the dht11 temperature and humidity sensor this one is slightly less accurate than the dht22 but updates quicker and this is the one you're generally going to see in starter kits we have a little gyro module which i think is kind of a fun thing to add you don't usually see this in in the more generic starter kits this is the uh i think it's a five axis whatever yeah i think it's a five axis gyro uh module so that's kind of fun we have the rain or the water detection module these things are often promoted to put underneath of sinks and try to detect leaks i've used them for water gun things where you want to see who shot first you can put these things in the targets for water guns so that's kind of fun and we have the hc sr04 ultrasonic module with transmit and receive where it shoots out some ultrasonic waves and sees how long it takes to get them back and usually use that to calculate some form of distance and this is a generic module not a branded one so oh and we have the usb cable which is actually it's your standard looking blue usb cable but it is definitely thinner than the ones that come in other kits i don't know that's better or worse but it's thinner so i went to lagoon's website and confirmed that the cd included in the kit contains the latest code when you download that file off of their website or open the cd you're given a list of files and these are the data sheets that come along with the modules and just to open up a couple of them the breadboard contains a six-page basic document on how a breadboard works as well as three pages specifically on the elegu breadboard with all of the random uh information about the board now they do say that the contacts are rated at fifty thousand insertions here as opposed to five thousand on the box but you get some really good information about the breadboard including the fact that these look like they're connected in the middle most breadboards you have to put a little jumper on this middle section to get that to go across additionally there is a 255 page manual that takes you through all of the various projects and components and shows you how they work and how to hook them up to the arduino looking at the code itself you'll see that it is provided in multiple languages and i'm going to go to english because that's what i speak and they include the libraries as well as that 255 page manual which is right here how to install it on linux very cool stuff this code is made to correspond to the lessons in the book which is why there's no lesson one two and three but you can come in here and take a look at that dot matrix grid that eight by eight grid for example and you'll see that there is a sketch for it as well as the library so we can double click this and you'll see there's you know there's a decent amount of commenting in these sketches it's not a full tutorial in the sketch but they're telling you basically what they're doing which i think is is pretty cool they took a little bit of extra time to do that so uh overall i'm really happy with the way the code is laid out i'm really happy with the way this is all formatted and again you're just never going to go wrong with ellagoo so back in the day there was a phrase that people would say and it was nobody ever got fired for buying ibm and the idea was yeah there were newer shinier things on the market but ibm was a safe choice and i sort of feel the same way about elegu nobody ever ruined christmas buying elegu uh you know you buy this kit and there may be shinier kits on the market there may be cheaper kits on the market there may be kits with more parts on the market but in my experience you never go wrong with elegu elegu works the instructions are great the parts are quality it's good value for money and elegu just makes solid starter kits so hey thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: AnotherMaker

Views: 10,409

Keywords: elegoo, mega, starter kit, amazon starter kit, amazon arduino

Id: 5mqSCtXkbjk

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020