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Israel, Jerusalem
1 Level
484 Review
0 Karma

Review on ๐Ÿ” Discover the ELEGOO Mega R3 Project Ultimate Starter Kit โ€“ Complete with TUTORIAL for Arduino IDE by Anna Crane

Revainrating 5 out of 5

I got up and ran for 8 minutes. The most complete set.

I rarely review products and even more rarely give them 5 stars. This is a comprehensive starter kit at a very reasonable price. I also bought a separate set of 37 sensors. There are so many gadgets in these two sets that it would take me months to master them all. Yes, there are a few misspelled words and other minor issues, but I think the company really put their heart and soul into creating a great product. And they voluntarily provide their contact information in many places and want you to contact them if you have any problems. Some other complaints relate to getting started and using the product with the instructions provided. I was able to install everything and control the LED lighting with example code in 8 minutes, no kidding. But you need to understand that this is not a child's toy, but real technical components. It's up to you to decide, to learn, to solve problems, and to build what you want out of components, not a step-by-step set. That's the beauty of it. Those with a technical or engineering background have a huge advantage. You must learn to program with C code and explore how the components work. For example, I wasn't able to get the stepper motor from this kit to work with the sample stepper motor code that comes with the Arduino IDE. But that's because the example code refers to a different stepper motor and there are many different kits with different types of stepper motors. It took me two hours to learn about stepper motors and I was able to write my own code to control them. I'm fortunate to have a technical background with little C code experience, so I could see it taking someone a lot longer to figure out a problem with a stepper motor or give up altogether. If you really want to learn Arduino, you can. Be patient, buy books like Simon Monk's Arduino Programming, browse the forums, watch YouTube tutorials etc. In summary this is a great product and it comes as advertised. I suspect a lot of the frustration stems from the fact that this is a fairly advanced set and not a toy. Thank you for reading my review and good luck. UPDATE: I've spent more time looking at the sample code provided by Elegoo and the stepper motor code they provided works great. My comments above were based on the fact that I took the code that came with the Arduino IDE, which was incompatible. Again, I think this set is great. Probably most of the negative reviews stem from a misunderstanding of how to use everything.

Pros
  • Consistent test results
Cons
  • Poor instructions