Our Guide for Arduino Beginner Kits

Updated 22 April 2022

Kits are a pretty nifty idea for someone starting out in maker electronics. For this beginner-friendly article, we are just going to take a look at three of our great kits for the Arduino Uno. All three are all solder-free electronics kits that are fantastic options for beginners!

These kits will fast track you with useful concepts that you can adapt for your project needs later on. They introduce you to the Arduino ecosystem, and they come with educational guidance for electronics in general. Some of the kits tend to delve a little deeper into the theory behind the electronics in the circuit, and some like to get to functional endpoints, covering briefly on the need-to-know elements. They come from all corners of the globe too; we have kits from the USA, China and even our very own, Australian inventors kit. Looking at three bundles, in particular, we will try to inform you of the package contents and hopefully you will get a feel for which option will be best for you. 

What is an Arduino Compatible Board?

Arduino is built on Open Source Hardware (OSHW). To clarify what that means to you; the open-source nature of the Arduino platform means the designs are publicly available for anyone to make, modify, distribute, and use. Open-source Hardware in Arduinos case has led other companies to take the idea of Arduino's microcontroller board and creating their own, personalized flavor. These boards still feature the same microcontroller chip (the ATMega328 in the case of the Uno), are completely compatible with the Arduino Development Environment (meaning you get all the libraries, sketches, and community); however, other elements of the board are customized to the designers liking.

Arduino puts all the designs up for everyone, allowing users to use, modify and manufacture them for free. It allows people to add and fix any design issues and niggles on their own, with the critical fixes incorporated into the newest design by Arduino. This process is at the very core of what open-source hardware is all about, and it's one of the reasons everyone loves Arduino! So don't let the term "Arduino-Compatible" scare you off, but if you want to support the innovators behind the product, you'll know where to put your money. 

freetronics-kit-arduinoWe support Australian Innovation, the Freetronics Experimenters Kit for Arduino

The Freetronics Experimenters Kit for Arduino is an Australian grown kit for the Arduino Uno microcontroller board made by John Oxley and the people over at Freetronics. It features the Freetronics Arduino Eleven, a 100% Arduino Compatible board. The kit comes with over 100 discrete electrical components, all of them used in the projects within the package. Each project is described, in a lot of detail, in the 50-page soft-cover project book.

A sample project from the book begins with a blurb about the following project, including why it's important to learn about the concepts presented and what the goal of the project is. Following the introduction, you will see a list of parts you need to grab out of your kit, all of the parts listed being included in the kits contents. Attached with the list is a colorful circuit sketch that shows how all of your components need to be connected. Then there is a summary/method, outlining how each of your components needs to be handled/connected; this is where the intricacies of the polarized components etc are discussed. Once you have the hardware assembled correctly, you'll move into the coding necessary for the microcontroller make the magic happen.

There's a copy of the Arduino Sketch (the code for your Arduino) that will run your project, but the value in this method of teaching coding comes alongside the code. John includes an incredibly in-depth explanation of each of the coding concepts as you proceed from setup to finish, from the variable declaration in Project 1 through to binary-shifting data with For Loops for some shift-register projects later on.

It's so easy to read and understand the concepts from this project book. The simplicity and comprehensive feel you get from this kit is a reflection of the effort Freetronics has put into their content and educating people about makers.


What about all the other options?!

There are a ton of choices when it comes to picking a beginner kit for Arduino, the two you will see below are our favorite of the lot.

The Arduino Starter Kit from Arduino is an excellent choice for the young minds out there, or anyone interested in the theory behind the electronics. The accompanying guidebook and Youtube videos that you get with your Arduino Starter Kit are fantastic resources that will see you through to an incredibly deep understanding of the way your circuit prototypes are working.

In parallel, the DFRobot Beginner Kit for Arduino is still a great option, coming with an equal number of projects, components and even throwing in some additional goodies (like the Proto-Shield). The content isn't as in-depth and educating as Arduino's guidebook in my opinion; it feels like it was written for a technically-minded person that is interested in branching into electronics. If that sounds like you then definitely check out the Beginner Kit, it's a great pick-up for anyone interested in 8-bit microcontrollers!  

We've created this handy side-by-side comparison (see below).

dfrobot-arduino-kit-comparisonArduino Kits

 

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