399
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #53,240 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
I was up and running in 8 minutes. Most comprehensive kit.
I rarely give feedback on products and even more rarely give them 5 stars. This is a comprehensive starter kit at a very competitive price. I also bought the separate 37 sensor kit. There are so many gadgets in both these kits it will take me months to get through all of them. Yes, there are some misspelled words and other minor issues, but I think the company really put their heart into assembling a great product. And they freely give their contact information out in many places and want you to contact them with issues.
Some other complaints are around getting started and using the product with the instructions provided. I was able to install everything and control an LED light with sample code in 8 minutes, not kidding. But you have to realize this is not a kids toy, these are real engineering components here. Its up to you to learn, problem solve and create what you want from the components as opposed to being a step by step kit. That's the whole fun of it. Those with a technical or engineering background will be at an enormous advantage.
You must learn how to program using C code and research how the components work. For example, I was unable to get the stepper motor to work from this kit with the example stepper motor code that comes with Arduino IDE. But that's because the example code is for a different stepper motor and there are many different kits out there with different types of stepper motors. I took me two hours to learn about stepper motors and was able to write my own code to control it. I'm lucky to have an engineering background with a little bit of C code experience so I could see someone taking much longer to figure out the stepper motor issue or giving up completely. If you really want to learn Arduino, you can. Be patient, buy books like Programming Arduino by Simon Monk, browse forums, watch YouTube tutorials, etc.
So I'll summarize by saying that this is a great product and ships as advertised. I suspect many frustrations are because this is a fairly advanced kit and not a toy. Thank you for reading my review and good luck.
UPDATE: I spent more time going through the sample code provided by Elegoo and the stepper motor code they provided works perfect. My comments above were based on my grabbing the code that comes with Arduino IDE which was incompatible. Again, I think the kit is great. Probably most negative feedback coming from misunderstanding how to use everything.
December 2016 · Electronics · verified purchase