Arduino Starter Kit for beginner K030007 [Spanish projects book]

This is genuine Arduino item - extremely well packaged and presented - and as far as I can see by doing comparisons supersedes the original Arduino UNO starter kit. I bought this in preference to the clones which are significantly cheaper primarily because I felt that I ought to give myself the best chance of success - time to use the clones once I know what I am doing :-)Altho a fully qualified engineer I decided to work my way thro the projects in the book (an age thing-I never used to !!) as I have not played with these particular devices before - and I found the book was very useful - even though I knew the theory behind the ccts the practice of setting up etc as advised was very good and it shows both a cct diagram and a picture of the completed board. If you are a cct designer - you will probably find it a bit simple - but this is a starter kit. It also introduces you to the programming of these devices - if you have MicroSoft Basic" programming experience you should have no problem programming this device - the languages are not the same but there are obvious similarities. There are also many on line tutorials but I can already see some very useful ideas/projects that I can implement on my model railway.!!Some beginner comments (cognoscenti look away now!!) Check all the components before doing anything else - It is worth having a simple multimeter to check the resistors as some are 4 band and some 5 - get it wrong and you might blow the LEDs or the cct may not work - if you are knocking on a bit it is also worth having a magnifying glass to see some of the bands - particularly the yellows! - I actually labelled each section (not each resistor !!) on the resistor strip with the value to save time later.Note in doing setup the wooden mounting plate is now plasticI found it useful to put in a small (3mm deep) 4mm o.d. collar between the plastic mounting board and the Uno itself on each fixing bolt as the soldered connections on the back of the board can otherwise interfere with the level seating of the Uno on the board - not essential but.....it does allow you to tighten up mounting bolts without distorting the UNO PCB.Additional tools I found useful are tweezers for picking up components, and a pair of narrow (snipe) nose pliers - some of the holes in the breadboard are a wee bit tight and the component legs need to be pushed in quite firmly to seat properly - the pliers are for the fumbly-fingered among us - they allow you to grasp the leg very close to the hole so the leg doesn't buckle as you push. Finally the LEDS - note once installed you cannot tell which is the long leg and which the short because unlike the diagrams the LED legs are straight - I put a kink in the long leg - if you do do this make sure you hold the leg adjacent to the LED and put the kink on the open leg side not the LED side - DO NOT bend or strain the leg at the point it joins the LED - you may well break the LED !!All in all I am very happy with my seriously discounted purchase ( :-) )and am already plotting which add-on shields I need.

I'm a programmer by trade, and recently started wondering how it (ie electronics circuits) all works. And maybe start hacking in the future. Arduino is a great tool to get started with simple projects, and I thought this kit could a nice entry point. Although it has a few flaws, I had a lot of fun going through the 15 toy projects presented in the booklet. Except for a soldering iron that you'll need in the last project, a 9V battery from project 9 and on, and a Philips screwdriver, no special tool is required, but I found a multimeter was really useful to understand what's going on: is there any voltage, current, does this sensor have a resistance? Highly recommended.The projects start slow and easy and build on top of each others. New concepts are usually pretty well explained, but you'll sometimes need to search for more information on the Internet to really understand what's going on. With the spread of arduino there is plenty of documentation out there, so no worries. The schematics in the booklet are easy to understand, although they sometimes don't match exactly with what you get with the kit. I found it easy enough to adjust the drawings and make it work.The Arduino software sucks really, the IDE is ugly and the connection unreliable. On the flip side, the examples of this kit have already been typed in so one can just load them in a two clicks and upload them to the board. It's not what I was really interested in in the first place, but worth a note I think.My main gripe with this kit is that not all the components match up with each others. It starts at the very beginning when screwing the board onto the "wood" base (looks like plastic to me). Some pins are protruding from the back of the Arduino board and it just doesn't screw flat. I was too lazy (and missing the right tools) to cut the board properly, so I now have a "bent" Arduino (couldn't see any adverse effect yet). The next problem that shows up, the main one really, is that some components don't really fit on the breadboard. To name just a few of the major ones, the orientation switch keeps jumping out of the board, the piezo speaker is too big, the potentiometers don't make good contact with the board, and the male header pins needed to connect the servo motor don't fit at all. This is the kind of stuff I'd expect a kit to do right, and this one doesn't. It takes out some of the fun when one has to think of "how am I going to connect these two wires" instead of thinking what fun things I could do with them and how to modify it to make it even better. But overall it was still plenty of fun to go through the projects!

Really great kit, the book is fantastic. There are a few inconsistencies though between the book and the equipment provided. The resistors don’t match so it’s very difficult and frustrating for beginners to choose the right ones for each project. Some of the devices are also different dimensions so not possible to replicate the drawings.

This is a fantastic kit but I do have one niggle; For the first project in the book, you are supplied with a picture of required components showing a 4 band resistor. It does not tell you that you may have a 5 band resistors equivalent until a few pages later. I looked at the image and with no knowledge of how to read resistors assumed the kit was incomplete.

The book included with this kit is great!All the projects are fun and it is easy to follow along with them.This is an amazing way to get to grips with electronics.All the code needed is in the book, so don’t worry if you have no experience.Also, if you are stuck, the Arduino IDE has the sketches (programs) for these projects built in.Please be aware that you will need a PC/Laptop in order to program this.

Expensive for what is supplied. Some components of poor quality, particularly the Tilt Sensor which was very difficult to attach to the breadboard, and the Peizo which would not function as a Knock Sensor.The manual supplied was very good in all aspects, and I suspect the high price is due to the manual and the fact that product is genuine Arduino.There is no provision for storing the components, a nice plastic storage box with compartments would be useful and considering the price of the kit I think this should be included.Support from Arduino via email was excellent.