This holiday season I decided to gift myself some basic electrical components in the form of a Arduino UNO set from Elegoo. I have always had a desire to tinker with electronics and in gifting myself this basic set I am now starting on a journey to quench my inner electrical workman's thirst. I hope to develop this hobby as I move forward and will, from time to time, post about it here on the blog. As the journey moves forward I am sure to run into trouble and issues. But as they say you can not master anything without first being a fool at it, so I have decided to remain a fool at it until I am a little good at it.
To start with, I do possess some elementary knowledge in electronics and electronic circuits. I intend to further my knowledge using the world wide web and following some very useful video channels on youtube.
I will first start with some very basic projects to familiarize myself with Arduino and basic electronic circuits and techniques such as soldering. Then gradually we will move to more aspirational tasks using the Arduino and or Raspberry pi.
The first question that can be asked is why I chose Arduino as the platform. The answer can be as simple as "I had to start somewhere and this seemed like an easy start". Or it can be complex. I briefly compared Arduino with Raspberry Pi. It is indeed true that Raspberry pi is a more powerful platform. However it is bit more powerful than what a beginner needs. raspberry pi is quite literally a tiny computer with processor, RAM, Graphics and ports on a single small circuit board. It is compact and the use case scenarios can therefore be complex. You can use the Raspberry Pi just as you would use a computer. On the other hand, Arduino is a microchip on board. It does not have the accompanying RAM, Graphics etc built into that board. So it is mostly a culmination point for input and output only type of functions. You can build a simple robot with arduino whereas you can build a more complex robot with Raspberry pi. So for a beginner who is just learning the ropes of this technology Raspberry pi is an overkill. Not to say that in future this is not possible or that arduino is an all or nothing package.
So after selecting my platform I went ahead and visited the place every one visits to order stuff these days. I had to visit Amazon. Here the choices are quite a lot in terms of ordering stuff. Difficult to say where one should start. Therefore, I looked at the starter kit sold by Arduino itself on Amazon. This kit should have all the things that one needs to start with Arduino supposedly as it is sold by the maker of Arduino. It was a bit expensive but I went ahead and ordered it. The biggest drawback I noticed from the very beginning was that there was no prime shipping on this order. In fact the estimated delivery time was one to two months from the time of the order. This was unacceptable to the generation instant relief. So while this order brewed in the purgatory of Amazon shipping I continued my search for a cheaper and/or faster delivery method. It is here where I learned that anyone can built on the arduino architecture and market their own PCB and kits. I found Elegoo, being one of them and it had good reviews as well. So I looked up its starter kits on Amazon and lo and behold! These starter kits were not only cheaper but also came with more components in a kit. There was prime shipping available as well and therefore after much thought (not really), I cancelled my order from Arduino original and sent for an order through Elegoo and co.
So this is how on Christmas Eve Santa delivered a package at our doorstep with two boxes, containing our starter kit for Arduino projects. I will update in a future blog as to the contents of these boxes in detail in a future post.
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