Question Must have components in Arduino kit

[General Kenobi]

Hello everyone planning to get an Arduino Uno kit, which electronics components and other miscellaneous are must have for a beginner i already have the following modules;
Esp8266
Lcd
Relay
Dc motor
Soldering iron kit
In planning to get this, anything to add??

Buy Arduino Uno R3 Beginners Kit Online at Best Price in India

Get everything you need to start making your Arduino projects with this beginners kit. Shop now at the lowest price online at Robu.in

robu.in

 

[Azzyasi]

Yes
If you just start out on arduino you might want to get a starter kit with a bundle of components and instructions and lessons. Some bundles are bigger some smaller. I see yours is a starter bundle.
I got some from Plusivo https://www.plusivo.com/ (quite cheap.. sure not dirt chip as alibaba/aliexpress but it's in pocket change money sum). I got all their kits rPI4 rPI zero esp8266 and arduino nano. Now i have lots of doubles but no worry i made bigger projects by my own. Having 2-3 servos and 2-3 ultrosonic meters hc-sr04 are useful for interesting projects where measuring distance to objects in 2-3 directions i key (hint - robots, colision avoidance, 3d tracking object, etc)

So you will need special stuff for your projects but 1st you need to have a project in mind then the bits you need will be evident.

After you get ideas what to use arduino for you plan what to measure, and what to control and find what you need.
Example: Irigation automation - need to measure: time, soil moisture, air humidity, temperature (air, soil or both), sunlight, etc (or at least a few of these inputs), output could be a relay powering the real irigation pump, or a servo cracking open a ball valve, or other means to get water to plants. You might want a neat diplay to show info, maybe a logger on SD, some way of inputs like buttons and pots and sliders to adjust some parameters in the code. The you implement the code.
From this you could make a dumb timed irigation (once a day for 2minutes), then add the soil moture check to see if it needs irigation, then adjust duration of irigation by a multiplyer based of the air temperature and sunlight, then add a logger to monitor everything, then make it look in the logs to see how was the weather durring day to calculate what water needs it might need during night (some plants don't like to be watered during day, but at dawn-night-sunrise), and the list of hypothetical conditions and checks and bypasses and special cases can run endless. (or until you run out of memory/processing power/ IO ports and go searching for other controllers like PIC, Atmel, PLC, raspberryPI, and others. You might also want to invest in reliability and thrustworhyness. If a 1$ sensor and a 5$ board with a 3$ servo are in charge of mains water pipe and an inundation is a glitch away then don't. Everything must be beefed... quality sensors, quality powerful controller, and proper code (with lots of check, closed loop feedback and control, fail-safe options and actions, etc), quality wiring, EM isolation, electrical isolation from mains, etc.

The arduino logic chip is ok (ATMega 328), but build quality of the board itself is not anywhere near what you need to form a relyable system. These industrial automations are called PLC and go into the thousands of dolars.

Keep in mind arduino is just a basic controller and lacks thrustworthyness, so don't automate stuff that can get dangerous or expensive if controller (or sensors or output control or any) goes haywire.

 

[General Kenobi]

Yes
If you just start out on arduino you might want to get a starter kit with a bundle of components and instructions and lessons. Some bundles are bigger some smaller. I see yours is a starter bundle.
I got some from Plusivo https://www.plusivo.com/ (quite cheap.. sure not dirt chip as alibaba/aliexpress but it's in pocket change money sum). I got all their kits rPI4 rPI zero esp8266 and arduino nano. Now i have lots of doubles but no worry i made bigger projects by my own. Having 2-3 servos and 2-3 ultrosonic meters hc-sr04 are useful for interesting projects where measuring distance to objects in 2-3 directions i key (hint - robots, colision avoidance, 3d tracking object, etc)

So you will need special stuff for your projects but 1st you need to have a project in mind then the bits you need will be evident.

After you get ideas what to use arduino for you plan what to measure, and what to control and find what you need.
Example: Irigation automation - need to measure: time, soil moisture, air humidity, temperature (air, soil or both), sunlight, etc (or at least a few of these inputs), output could be a relay powering the real irigation pump, or a servo cracking open a ball valve, or other means to get water to plants. You might want a neat diplay to show info, maybe a logger on SD, some way of inputs like buttons and pots and sliders to adjust some parameters in the code. The you implement the code.
From this you could make a dumb timed irigation (once a day for 2minutes), then add the soil moture check to see if it needs irigation, then adjust duration of irigation by a multiplyer based of the air temperature and sunlight, then add a logger to monitor everything, then make it look in the logs to see how was the weather durring day to calculate what water needs it might need during night (some plants don't like to be watered during day, but at dawn-night-sunrise), and the list of hypothetical conditions and checks and bypasses and special cases can run endless. (or until you run out of memory/processing power/ IO ports and go searching for other controllers like PIC, Atmel, PLC, raspberryPI, and others. You might also want to invest in reliability and thrustworhyness. If a 1$ sensor and a 5$ board with a 3$ servo are in charge of mains water pipe and an inundation is a glitch away then don't. Everything must be beefed... quality sensors, quality powerful controller, and proper code (with lots of check, closed loop feedback and control, fail-safe options and actions, etc), quality wiring, EM isolation, electrical isolation from mains, etc.

The arduino logic chip is ok (ATMega 328), but build quality of the board itself is not anywhere near what you need to form a relyable system. These industrial automations are called PLC and go into the thousands of dolars.

Keep in mind arduino is just a basic controller and lacks thrustworthyness, so don't automate stuff that can get dangerous or expensive if controller (or sensors or output control or any) goes haywire.

Hey thank you for all those details and also thank you for the break down of the example you gave definitely ill keep those point in check. What project will you recommend me as I'm a beginner?

 

[Azzyasi]

Hey thank you for all those details and also thank you for the break down of the example you gave definitely ill keep those point in check. What project will you recommend me as I'm a beginner?

Thanks for appreciation.

I'm not a guru of arduino if any i'm close to beginner. I recently got those kits from plusivo (less than a year). The lessons included made a huge start for me as it made me understand code sintax and logic and a bit of electronics. I am a phd engineer into mechanical, but electronics were a bit of a mistery. So i don't really know how great the included lessons are since i already knew how to make a good program (from years of LabView, matlab, excel, CATIA, Ansys.. all very engineering programs) needed the syntax and the quircs of defining inputs and outputs.

But from those lesons i got to adapt, mix and combine them and play with random scenarios and you get a hang of what and how you can control.
Here are their lessons. You can certainly make many of these lesons with what you have. http://kits.plusivo.com/
Look for the "wireless kit" that one is around the esp8266 module and the nano kit (that is around arduino nano but functions the same as uno but in small format)

Anyway, i've started to mix the lessons.. like there is one to make a thermometer. I've made a distance meter with the same display from the thermometer lesson. Then displayed the distance on 10bar display, added a buzzer to act like a parking sensor in a car that beeps faster and faster to tell distance, then made it send wireless via esp8266. Then got a logger shield and played with that to divert the serial monitor outputs to an SD card.

Then added more sensors into the mix, and servos, dc motors, display drivers, etc. Many are presented in these lessons and the main purpose is to teach how to use that particular sensor/display/etc.. as well as teaching basic programming for arduino in general. I had no practical goal. My end goal was to learn for fun. (i am into teaching at university as a daily job.. i like to teach, i like to learn new stuff.. so this is me).

I did a few applications where i dedicated a cheap arduino to control something.. but usually arduino is just the development stage. The practical stage includes a custom PCB, with tailored components, instead of arduino you use the exact microcontroller chip, add only what you need to make it function, maybe leave space for upgrades in future if are in sight. I'm not at that level yet.

 

[General Kenobi]

Thanks for appreciation.

I'm not a guru of arduino if any i'm close to beginner. I recently got those kits from plusivo (less than a year). The lessons included made a huge start for me as it made me understand code sintax and logic and a bit of electronics. I am a phd engineer into mechanical, but electronics were a bit of a mistery. So i don't really know how great the included lessons are since i already knew how to make a good program (from years of LabView, matlab, excel, CATIA, Ansys.. all very engineering programs) needed the syntax and the quircs of defining inputs and outputs.

But from those lesons i got to adapt, mix and combine them and play with random scenarios and you get a hang of what and how you can control.
Here are their lessons. You can certainly make many of these lesons with what you have. http://kits.plusivo.com/
Look for the "wireless kit" that one is around the esp8266 module and the nano kit (that is around arduino nano but functions the same as uno but in small format)

Anyway, i've started to mix the lessons.. like there is one to make a thermometer. I've made a distance meter with the same display from the thermometer lesson. Then displayed the distance on 10bar display, added a buzzer to act like a parking sensor in a car that beeps faster and faster to tell distance, then made it send wireless via esp8266. Then got a logger shield and played with that to divert the serial monitor outputs to an SD card.

Then added more sensors into the mix, and servos, dc motors, display drivers, etc. Many are presented in these lessons and the main purpose is to teach how to use that particular sensor/display/etc.. as well as teaching basic programming for arduino in general. I had no practical goal. My end goal was to learn for fun. (i am into teaching at university as a daily job.. i like to teach, i like to learn new stuff.. so this is me).

I did a few applications where i dedicated a cheap arduino to control something.. but usually arduino is just the development stage. The practical stage includes a custom PCB, with tailored components, instead of arduino you use the exact microcontroller chip, add only what you need to make it function, maybe leave space for upgrades in future if are in sight. I'm not at that level yet.

Thanks again and yes improvisation is really helpful while learning and i might probably start with the project similar to yours since i already have a ESP8266.
Thanks again, hope you enjoy learning and teaching more.