Review on 🔌 ELEGOO UNO R3 Project Comprehensive Starter Kit with Tutorial – Compatible with Arduino IDE (Inclusive of 63 Items) by Ruth Reiners

I was looking for an Arduino clone starter kit and looked at many options. I am an Electrical Engineer with over 15 years of experience designing, manufacturing and testing space electrical equipment for satellites. I have very high quality standards and was hesitant to purchase this set due to the low price and feared it would be complete rubbish. However, I figured the price was so damn low that even if it turned out to be junk it wouldn't be much of a waste. Wow, I'm glad I bought this! First, the set comes in a very handy organizer. I found this to be a really nice feature that helps save time when looking for details to create each individual project. Upon initial inspection, the quality of each component was found to be very acceptable. Definitely inferior parts - as you would expect at this price point - but certainly not junk quality. By poor quality I mostly mean solder quality, but also the individual parts used in assemblies are your standard Chinese parts of poor quality. Some soldered parts were installed askew and some PCB assemblies still showed contamination from improper flushing. Again this is all you would expect at this price point and so far I have been very pleased. The real test will be whether everything works. I went through all the tutorials and found the instructions to be very easy to understand. The kit comes with a CD that claims to contain all the necessary software, tutorials, and datasheets. My laptop doesn't have a CD drive so I downloaded everything from the Elegoo website. Either way, this is probably the best option - that way you know you're using the latest versions of everything. The specs were nice to have, although some of them weren't as detailed as they should be. Nevertheless still usable. The tutorial was clearly written - it's definitely not poorly translated from Chinese to English as I expected. It is written entirely in plain English. At some points I wish it could explain the code and syntax better, but honestly, Google can handle it. Each guide was easy to follow and I only found one technical error: the DC motor controller guide did not include a ground jumper between the Arduino board and the breadboard/motor controller board. As a result, the logic levels of the control signals on both boards were not properly referenced to the same ground potential. The motor didn't respond properly at first, but a quick troubleshooter forced me to add a mass and everything worked fine after that. I have tested every component in the kit and everything works as intended. I'm a little surprised by this, but very, very happy. It was a lot of fun playing with this set. It's ideal for those who want to get started with Arduinos. It has so many different interesting components that will keep you entertained and boost your creativity. I highly recommend it!