Kuman Arduino-Compatible R3 Board Starter Kit with Sensors, Breadboard, Jumper Wires, Motors, LCD, Tutorial for Beginners to Learn Robotics Coding and Electronics Projects

As an avid maker and YouTuber, people often ask me what to buy to get started with Arduino. I usually ask them what they want to do with the Arduino and suggest components useful towards their project. But this kit is very reasonably priced for all the components included. So, I decided to check it out before I would recommend it to my friends. I'm happy to report that is a great value! You could get it cheaper directly from China, but for just a few dollars more I received it in two days instead of four weeks waiting from China. It is a good kit, but let's start with the bad news: It is a Chinese clone, not a genuine Arduino, but it works fine. You might have to install some drivers, but I didn't have to because I already use many clone Arduinos. There is no printed instructions, the CD contains some "lessons" that are more of a guide to build using the various components with very little explanation. The diagrams were often confusing, but thankfully there are plenty FREE excellent Arduino resources online. There is even a decent knockoff book on the CD. The worst thing about this kit hopefully is that ALL the white jumper wires were defective (the two ends are not connected to each other). The wires look perfectly fine, but there must've been a manufacturing defect on all the white batch. I spent over an hour before I deduced that SOME of the wires weren't working! Whoever heard of a broken jumper wire?! If you're still reading you might be wondering why I gave this item a five star?! Well, I contacted Kuman, and they were very responsive and sent replacement jumper wires and matrix (it had a dead pixel). Thanks KumanTech! Now the good: This kit is an incredible value for the money. I'm not even sure you could purchase all the pieces separately from China for a better price. Having it all in one box two days after I order it is worth it. Parts come well packed. Parts that needs padding were padded. No pins were bent (as is often the case if you order directly from China). There are many similar kits, but I like this one because of the included parts. The number of projects you could build JUST with this kit is pretty amazing. You really could start playing with Arduino with just what you receive in this kit (and the internet as your resource). It even comes with a battery! That you don't really need because you can power everything off the USB port of your computer which you will need to program the Arduino anyway. I could go on praising every part of this kit. There are so many parts to play with. I'm going to stop writing and go play some more. AMA.

Great kit! Everything from the arduino clone to the sensors and RGB LED to test with, has been keeping myself and 2 son's busy playing and learning! In my attempt to keep my two son's (15 and 17) off of their cell phones, gaming consoles or girlfriends (oh yes, the struggle is real at this age) I wanted to grab their attention whilst trying to teach them some electronics theory and circuit design. So far it's been a hit and all 3 of us enjoy thinking about 'what we could do or make or.. or..' which was exactly what my set goal was. Great packaging and an assortment of items will keep us learning into the future. We need to teach our kids these skills, as I was taught by my father, so they too can understand the general ideas around electronics. Our next venture will be with home automation and I'm confident many of the items within this kit will be used. Thanks for a great bit of kit!

Good components for a great price, would be five stars if data sheets were included. I've had to do quite a bit of looking components up online to understand the technical specifications and I wish the information was included in the kit. Maybe not as good as the Arduino starter kit, but a good kit if you already have a grasp on how some basic components work.

The Good: Ridiculously fantastic deal. The components that I have used (I'd say about half of them) I've had no issues with whatsoever. Complete newbie, knew nothing about programming (aside from half a course of Python) but I jumped right in. There's mountains of example code across the internet, for most things you probably won't have to write anything from scratch. The books that get emailed to you after a couple of days are *amazing* resources. Tons of sample code, good explanations, and each is hundreds and hundreds of pages. The bad: Some of the -quality- on some of the components feels cheap as if it's not designed to last. Things like jumpers and what have you don't make as good of a connection as I'd prefer. The books and info about it took a few days, was happy when it came, but I was anxious to get started. Good luck ever getting everything back in the case ever again. Overall: Love it. Price point was freakin' perfect. Will keep you busy for weeks, months, possibly years. Really does have everything you could want in a kit like this. Good for all skill levels. Rock on Kuman!

This kit has served me well for so many years. I never used it for a full on project on its own but many of the parts have supplemented separate projects. To this day I still use and reuse many of the components. Great value!

This product is is a great Arduino starter kit. You can check out the components listed in the product description. I have tried most of the components and found them to be quality. Connections are easy, the pieces are solid, and there is plenty to play around with. It is time to get a few more pieces and parts so I can turn it into a sumo bot. (Can you say 3D printer?) The instructions are lacking a little, but that is the nature of Arduino in general, that said there are so many useful sites available for learning and this set is an Arduino Uno compatible kit. Arduino as language is very C/Java-like and easy enough to learn. My computer science kids have been loving it, and who knows, maybe we will incorporate this into our robotics club in the future. I highly recommend this as a starter kit.

This is a very complete starter kit with an Arduino clone board. The kit is packed with components and everything I've tried seems to work as expected. Although this kit doesn't come with a manual, it does have a link to a bunch of files that Kuman has collected that will be very helpful for beginners (including the first edition of Monk's evil genius book in pdf) and which will keep you busy for a long time. If you follow those materials or Monk's course on Adafruit you will have virtually everything you need here and then some. Highly recommended if you are willing to dig a little for the files. There is so much material online that you will find a use for everything in here eventually. My only complaint is that one of the latches on the box broke almost immediately, but was repairable with crazy glue.

I would give this product a higher rating if it wasn't for the mediocre customer support and poor documentation. Here are my comments: 1. The kit arrived OK, well packaged and components in good order. The quality of the items seemed acceptable considering the price. 2. Don't waste you time trying to get everything back into the same box...just grab an extra box. 3. The enclosed CD did not have an English version of the tutorials. How hard would that be? After some time I was able to determine which kit (K4) and download an English tutorial (tutorials11.doc) from their website. 4. The kumantech English tutorial contains many Chinese screengrabs in the setup section. Impossible to follow. But, I was able to get the IDE software loaded and running from information on the arduino websites. 5. When I began the tutorials, I found I needed some help...guess what? The provided e-mail does not work and came back DAEMON FAILURE. 6. The first few Lessons are well detailed and easy to follow, the later lessons are written in "Chinglish" and cannot be understood. 7. I did find very useful and well-written pdf programming instruction texts on the kumantech website. No idea who prepared these, but it wasn't kumantech. 8. Overall, for someone not familiar with Arduino, a kit of some type is a good way to start. Luckily, considering the shortcomings of the tutorial, there are hundreds of examples and tutorials on the internet as well as forums that offer assistance...but, that all takes time, when I should just be able to sit down and work through a properly prepared tutorial. 9. Oh yeah, the enclosed stepper motor/driver... would not function cw/ccw with kumantech's code...a forum response got it working for me...then 30 minutes later it stopped working altogether.