Arduino Explore IoT Kit Rev2 [AKX00044] - Comprehensive Educational Kit for Advanced High School and College Students to Create Sustainable Internet of Things Projects with Real-World Applications

150 dollar kit comes with NO SUBSCRIPTION to the Arduino Cloud which I've confirmed with their support team. You can try to navigate the labrynth of github education and jump through about 30 hoops to get a free 6 months of the service or you can just pay the 6.99 a month they basically force you into doing. My student developer kit STILL doesn't work on github despite jumping through 30 hoops. Which is what Arduino REQUIRES for you to learn the basics of their kit. Pro tip - the instructions for use are AWFUL. Go to the data sheet on cloud arduino and read that before anything. Mine arrived with some of the worst instructions possible. The MKR and carrier itself are nice if you were able to learn how to use them.

I’ve been a loyal Arduino supporter for years, but my experience with the Rev2 Kit has been deeply disappointing. Unlike the Rev1 kit, the Rev2 no longer includes the activation code to unlock the full set of lessons, even though this was a key feature in the earlier version. Instead, you're forced to subscribe to an Arduino Cloud plan to access the remaining lessons, which feels like a bait-and-switch tactic. When I reached out to their support team, I was met with a lack of understanding and zero willingness to resolve the issue. They simply pointed to their policies and told me to read the fine print. If you're considering purchasing this kit, I strongly recommend looking at other options on the market. There are competitors offering better transparency, more complete packages, and stronger customer support. Save yourself the frustration and disappointment.

The Arduino IoT kit and its associated web interface is hot, stinking garbage. It's a terrible product and a terrible value, *at any price*. I spent far more time debugging and troubleshooting poor documentation, confusing interfaces, and hidden state distributed across the cloud and the board than I did writing any code at all. There are also broken drivers/libraries, two competing (and equally miserable web-based IDEs), a bug-ridden background agent that you must install on your computer, and a truly surpassing level of unreliability: it is completely unsuited for any kind of cloud application, because it's guaranteed to break and give up within a week. Don't get me started on the classroom "curriculum"; it's an unabashed cash grab to capitalize off of the (sure to be short-lived) Internet of Things enthusiasm that is currently being swamped by AI sensationalism. After having used this product for several months, thinking about Arduino and even embedded programming is sufficient to turn my stomach. Congratulations to Arduino, however: they've managed to create something that is guaranteed to make anyone of any age despise embedded programming and IoT.