Ask HN-Beginner Arduino Kits | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN-Beginner Arduino Kits

I’m not a super techy person (dentist) but I like the articles and discussions here.

My son (almost 9) is showing some interest in computers and programming. He likes his computer class in school and they do some programming lite games. He also likes taking things apart to see how they work.

Are there any good arduino all-in-one kits out there I could get and play around with him so he could see the connection between software and hardware? Want to keep it mostly fun and not overbearing.

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I would go with kits from Adafruit and Sparkfun. Avoid stuff of off aliexpress. Like others said cheap kits from Aliexpress come with scant documentation and even I have a hard time using dev kits I bought from there and have to rely random internet posts etc (and I do electrical engineering for a living)

Agreed with other commenters' advice to err towards good documentation. Don't just go for cheap.

Another consideration is community: I think the Adafruit guides (https://learn.adafruit.com/) are really great, especially for folks just starting out / who are more project-focused. Poke through there with your kid and see if anything sparks interest.

Shameless self-promo, if he's into music: I make an Arduino-compatible "synth" electronics kit. It does require soldering (so maybe isn't the best choice just yet) but is a nice step towards making something that looks like a real, finished product. https://www.oskitone.com/product/scout-synth-diy-electronics...

Arduino itself provides a starter kit with printed instructional material (https://store-usa.arduino.cc/collections/kits/products/ardui...) which probably would meet your needs.

A long time ago, we bough to our daughter a SparkFun kit, similar to https://www.amazon.com/SparkFun-15257-Arduino-Mini-Starter/d... or https://www.amazon.com/SparkFun-15254-Arduino-Mini-Starter/d...

it was a kit that has a breadboard, wires, and some assorted small components like leds and resistors, and some printed cards with projects to make and how to connect the electronic components. Check that the kit you buy has them. It's more expensive that buying each part separately, but it's much easier.

We later bough her some additional leds (you never have enough leds!) and two 7 segments displays, that are nice to show numbers. (There are two methods to connect the 7 segment display, we bought the wrong one and later the correct one. They are not expensive.)

I think the kit has some photoresistor and temperature sensors. It didn't have too many, but a few are nice.

We bought it a long time ago, so to dim a led you can send a signal that is up during some short time and down during same short time. It's good enough for leds, but it's impossible to use it to play music (even crappy one note music). I'd strongly recommend to buy one that can play music. Perhaps now all the available models are good enough to play music. (Anyone has more info or can point what to check?)

Most of the maker companies have their own Arduino-compatible devices nowadays, along with their own ecosystem.

Here's a couple that I found from companies I've experience with and enjoyed.

Seeed Studio has their Grove ecosystem. They have a starter kit here: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Grove-Beginner-Kit-for-Arduino-p...

Adafruit have an Arduino-compatible called Metro. They have a starter kit here: https://www.adafruit.com/product/170

SparkFun have a pretty straightforward LEDs and buttons kinda kit here: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18577

Honestly, they're all a good start.

Alternatively, I'd consider an RPi 400 if you want a more Commadore 64 (all-in-one PC to tinker with) approach.

Unless he has a specific interest/project in mind already, I'd look into something like this to start with:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/18577

It's from sparkfun so you generally get better support and docs than a random box of stuff from Aliexpress. The QWIIC ecosystem means that you can daisy chain a whole bunch of sensors easily and without soldering. It includes a small but nice selection of sensors, actuators, buttons and LEDs to play with and some suggestion projects.

Soldering and more advanced stuff can come a bit later if he gets into it. No need to discourage a kid from learning electronics because soldering is hard and you want to save 5$ by buying a bare IC instead of a breakout board (not to mention that the current shortage means that breakouts are often more easily available to hobbyists compared to bare chips).

Plus one for QWIIC. Choosing an ecosystem that's easy to buy (not always sold out) and cheap can make a big difference.

For this, you really want to aim for high quality kits with high quality documentation. The typical Ali Express cheapy kit is a box of stuff with no instructions at all; you're expected to use google-fu to figure out what all the bits and pieces do and how to connect them and where to find the libraries. Which is no problem once you know what you're doing. But that's too daunting for a beginner.

Another angle is robot/robocar kits powered by Arduino, with available source code and documentation. I sent an Elegoo Penguin Bot kit to a nephew, and wrote up a blurb to get him started on hacking the software; you can see the blurb here:

https://wandel.ca/misc/robot/

The code is pretty advanced for an Arduino project, but it's trivial to tinker with and immedately see the results.

There’s a 6 degrees of freedom robotic arm on Amazon. It was about $30 when I bought it. That price includes the Arduino controller. I built it and it works as advertised. It’s part of one of my products now.

A robotic arm is a lot more interesting than a generic kit. :)

Check out the bbc microbit, it's intended for exactly this. It has an array of leds, a couple buttons, some useful sensors. Web-based graphical editor based on scratch (visual programming language targeting kids) that smoothly transitions to python if you outgrow it.

This will avoid potentially a lot of frustrating code-adjacent things that professional programmers and serious hobbyists will be used to. In my experience teaching programming to beginners, you want to get them actually making changes to the thing as quickly as you can with as little friction as possible. Things like soldering, library dependencies, build process are all things to avoid at the beginning.

One great thing is it was designed to be used in primary school for kids in the uk so has a large amount of lessons to follow along with https://microbit.org/teach/lessons/

I'm a fan of the MakePython ESP32 dev kit. It's reasonably priced and the ESP32 makes it possible to do nice things. https://www.makerfabs.com/makepython-esp32-starter-kit.html

I used it for our Toit tutorial: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-TYea7jbYfj2ecMUmr0T0zd...

I'm teaching middle schoolers using Makeblock (https://www.makeblock.com/) products and I am completely blown away by how accessible these things are. Once the kids have built and programmed (using Scratch, Python, or C++) the bot out of the box, you can add RJ25 adapters which allow you to connect different electronics (in my case lasers, servos, and laser detectors).

Pick Raspberry Pi Pico instead.

But any good kit, but keep yourself with Pico.

It never gave me any trouble, although I use it outside of my job.

And instead of C, use MicroPython.

Raspberry Pi Foundation has a book.

When I got started with Arduino I bought a 5-volt AVR8 board

https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mega-2560-rev3

a breadboard

https://abra-electronics.com/boards/breadboards-wish/wbu-204...

lots of precut wires, some resistors, LEDs and about 20 74xx series chips...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_7400-series_integrated...

I think you could do as well with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_4000-series_integrated...

I think it's pretty fun to wire up circuits of logic chips and drive them with the Arduino.

My daughter is the same age. I teach her basic coding skills.

We tried an arduino kit we picked up from Micro Center. It has a project book which is quite good.

However, all the code is in C.

I tried the microbit and it was a lot easier for her to get started on her own. Having the option between visual block coding and Python was a good option to have.

I second microbit, and there are some robot kits that go with it too.

For a more 'electronics' experience, you could build your own arduino on a breadboard. eg: http://start.shrimping.it/

M5Stack sells some really good quality modules and I think kits as well. These work fine with Arduino, and also with their own UiFlow software.

The advantage I think with their products is that you only need to connect wires in general -- soldering and stuff is optional. They have good UI on hardware, and even include touchscreens, buttons and so on.

I think it will meet your "mostly fun" for sure!

Technically it's not Arduino in a sense that they mostly use ESP chips (not AVR), which is supported by Arduino IDE.

The homepage has good pictures if you want to get an idea: https://m5stack.com/

(Not shilling :) Just really like their products!)

> I’m not a super techy person (dentist) but I like the articles and discussions here.

I was going to ask a bit more about this then checked your comments and found you had answered someone else on this already! [1]

Do you happen to know any other niche online forums (eg non-tech ones) that have a lot of interesting discussions? Other than HN the only things I really use are Twitter and a few subreddits.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28811924

Hey! Not really honestly. I’m in a bunch of dentist Facebook groups so maybe try that for specific interests?

I'd focus on finding something extremely simple, paired with making sure he learns to solder so you don't have to buy marked up components he could have made himeself.

(I never bought into a space where it'd be safe to generate those fumes, so I stuck to... cyber stuff.)

Try finding a shop that sells them locally.

Don't buy any of it online.

Be sure to use cash or a gift card paid for in cash to frustrate the people who turned Radio Shack into what felt like the part of a casino where you can enter a raffle for a car.

Honestly, finding a brick-and-mortar store is getting harder these days. You might be lucky in a big city but I personally don't know anywhere with a good ramge and comparable pricing to online. Prices for microcontrollers is really good online.

I started off with Arduino when I was 10 thanks to my dad so I could unironically say that I have 10 years of programming experience. You are a good dad man, your kid is going to remember your effort.

Anyhow, other than buying a kit you should also consider getting a book even though there are probably loads of tutorials on YouTube explaining all of the basics.

My only interaction with Adafruit has been their documentation and their firmware stuff (that I can recommend).

They have a gift guide for young engineers. https://www.adafruit.com/explore/adafruit-gift-guide-young-e...

If you don't mind waiting there are some really cheap kits on aliexpress.com

There are also some sensor packs that are pretty cool. I usually stick to vendors with 50+ reviews.

eBay's usually a few bucks more but US sellers are faster.

The best bet at this age is lego mindstorms. Way easier to hook stuff up, great visual programming language (text based one too).

+1 for lego mindstorms, you can build all kinds of robots without dealing with solder and learning i2c protocol etc. I was building autonomous rover

i can also recommend the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert. it's pretty short and gives a great way to teach kids programming by encouraging them to put themselves in the computers' shoes, so to speak

once you have a collection of motors and sensors from lego robots and want to repurpose them, you can totally hack them into working with arduino, and i believe there are also projects to write C code on the lego mindstorms brick if you want to dig deeper that direction

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread already. Maybe I can add some thoughts based on running Makerspaces for a few years:

- I've hardly ever seen starter kits used fully. I think this is because most people I've seen have gone from learning the absolute basics (blinking a LED, usually) more or less straight to working on some individual and more complex project. For these, you usually end up needing things not included in a beginner kit (components, bigger breadboard, ...). However, there is nothing wrong with a starter kit and if I had to buy one, I'd go with an original Arduino kit [0].

- There are some really nice education-oriented boards available nowadays that integrate a lot of functionality (RGB LEDs, microphones, buzzers, LED matrices, light / acceleration / temperature sensors, you name it). Somebody already mentioned the micro:bit[1] but there are others as well. I can recommend Circuit Playground Express[2] or Calliope[3], for example.

- You can never go wrong with an Arduino Uno[4]. It's basic compared with newer offerings but in many ways it's a classic (lots of documentation and compatible hardware / "shields" out there). Buy the DIP version if you can, it's more repairable and flexible than the SMD versions.

- There are quite a few ways to code for those educational microcontrollers. Most of the fancy newer boards mentioned above (micro:bit, ...) are made to be used both with Micropython/Circuit Python[5] as well as with Open Roberta[6] or MakeCode[7], the latter two for a more visual approach to coding. Unfortunately, those boards usually are not Arduino compatible which is a shame because the (probably) most wide-spread way to code for educational microcontrollers in general is the "traditional" Arduino IDE[8]. Most people I've seen end up with Arduino compatible boards and the Arduino IDE because it's more flexible and most of the documented knowledge, libraries and other stuff out there relates to that. Of course there are other options as well ("modern" alternatives to the Arduino IDE as well as the chip makers' tools themselves, ...) but those can be ignored in beginner contexts.

- For beginner workshops, we often use a Circuit Playground Express for younger or very inexperienced persons (or if we really don't have much time). For everybody else, we most commonly use Arduino Unos with a breadboard, maybe a soldering iron, some jumpers, LEDs and resistors and go from there.

- My favourite supplier by far is Adafruit for a lot of reasons, mainly to do with their open source and hacker ethics as well as with the quality of their tutorials and documentation.

- I make it a point to regularly buy from Arduino (as in https://arduino.cc - not the clones) because their stuff is good quality and it's well worth supporting the "original".

- Seeed Studio has also been mentioned and I think it's one of the coolest companies in this space. You can get a lot of more exotic and specialized (and cheap) stuff from them as well as all the basic Arduino things. They are also a manufacturing & development house (PCBs, assembly, CNC, 3d printing, ...). However, in my experience, their documentation and tutorials are not as good as with Adafruit, Arduino or Sparkfun.

- I can highly recommend TinkerCAD Circuits[9] as a secondary learning tool. It's a pretty awesome microcontroller playground / simulator / learning space. Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no real open source alternative.

[0] The traditional choice: https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-... -- however, I think this one is more practical: https://store.arduino.cc/collections/kits/products/arduino-s...

[1] https://www.microbit.org/

[2] https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-expre...

[3] https://calliope.cc/

[4] https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-uno-rev3

[5] https://learn.adafruit.com/getting-started-with-raspberry-pi...

[6] https://www.open-roberta.org/

[7] https://makecode.com/

[8] https://www.arduino.cc/en/software

[9] https://www.tinkercad.com/learn/circuits

Many of the Adafruit boards and kits are designed for education and fun.

Some seeedstudio kits show up on eBay for the low low sometimes.

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