Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was looking for an Arduino clone starter kit and considered many options. I’m an Electrical Engineer with 15+ years experience designing, manufacturing and testing space flight electrical hardware for satellites. I have a very high standard for quality and was hesitant to purchase this kit due to its low price and my fears that it would be total junk. However, I figured the price was so darn low that even if it turned out to be junk, it wouldn’t be a huge waste. Wow, am I glad I bought this! First, the set arrives in a very useful organizer. I found this to be a really nice feature and helps save time when searching for parts to build each different project. Upon initial inspection, the quality of each component appeared very acceptable. Definitely low-quality parts — as you’d rightfully expect at this price point — but certainly no where near “junk” quality. By low-quality, I’m referring to mostly the solder quality, but also the individual piece-parts used in the assemblies are your standard Chinese low-grade parts. Some soldered parts were installed misaligned and some PCB assemblies still had visible contamination on them from inadequate washing. Again, this is all to be expected at this price point and so far, I was very pleased. The real test is if everything worked... I completed all the tutorials and found the instructions very easy to follow. A CD is included in the kit, which supposedly contains all the required software, tutorials and datasheets. My laptop doesn’t have a CD ROM drive so I downloaded everything on the Elegoo website. That’s probably the best option anyway — that way, you know you are using the latest versions of everything. The datasheets were a nice-to-have, although some of them were not as detailed as they should be. Still useful nonetheless. The tutorial manual was clearly written — it’s definitely not poorly translated Chinese-to-English like I expected. It’s entirely written in clear English. In some places, I wish it did a better job explaining the code and syntax, but honestly, that’s something Google can handle. Every tutorial was completed easily and I discovered only one technical mistake: the tutorial on DC motor control omitted a ground jumper between the Arduino board and the breadboard/motor controller board. Consequently, the control signal logic levels were not correctly referenced to the same ground potential on both boards. The motor did not respond correctly at first but some quick troubleshooting lead me to add the ground connection and everything worked flawlessly after that. I’ve tested every component in the kit now and everything works as intended. I’m a little bit surprised at this but very, VERY happy. This kit has been a ton of fun to play with. It’s perfect for anyone wanting to get started with Arduinos. It has so many different cool components that this will keep you entertained and get your creative juices flowing. I highly recommend it!