I always thought Dr. Ho's (or Uncle Ho's) foot massage was a Viet Cong torture technique of beating POWs on the soles of their bare feet with a bamboo rod. And although the terms motherboard and daughterboard came along later from the computer geeks, I learned it as main and auxiliary or sub board way back when. It took me a while, and I'm still not used to it and seldom use it, to become somewhat used to the term sketch instead of program. Silly artists...

 

I'm an electronic engineering student and electronic/arduino/raspberry pi hobbyist and I'm looking to get into learning about using IOT with microcontrollers.

Sean,
IMO, you are too deep into the hobby to make effective use o the $114 kit. The kit is a ground-up bootstrap course but will not concentrate on any technology beyond getting data into the ArduinoCloud and doing some graphs and back-end triggers. This "cloud" crap is way over-rated, just a datacenter running virtual webified workloads.

Consider your own cloud, Raspberry Pi based.
Here is how I took an Arduino Mega and made a web-accessible dashboard for just a few bucks.
Serial output directly into NodeRED - Arduino for STM32 (stm32duino.com)

Serial over USB could transition to Bluetooth, LoRa, optical, etc. The Raspberry Pi could be an old Intel PC running Raspberry OS. The LAN could become the WAN with a bit of firewall rules: then your smartphone could be leveraged from anywhere!

IoT is simply too vague to have it confined to a kit.

Good luck,

Ray

 

I always thought Dr. Ho's (or Uncle Ho's) foot massage was a Viet Cong torture technique of beating POWs on the soles of their bare feet with a bamboo rod. And although the terms motherboard and daughterboard came along later from the computer geeks, I learned it as main and auxiliary or sub board way back when. It took me a while, and I'm still not used to it and seldom use it, to become somewhat used to the term sketch instead of program. Silly artists...

That term came up as "falanga", although nothing related to "Ho". I take it you never seen Dr Ho's late night TV ads? I'm absolutely blown away he's still in business. It scares me to think people are hooking up power supplies to their feet..

 

The Ho I'm thinking of was Ho Chi Min. Commander of the N. Vietnam Army and the Viet Cong. The American POWs came up with Ho' foot massage was the tale I was told long ways back.

 

Just a point that should be considered when choosing to buy from Arduino you are helping to fund the development of the open source boards and IDE that other manufacturers produce so cheaply. They don't have the development costs of Arduino, or similarly, of any of the companies in the Arduino ecosystem (e.g.: SparkFun, AdaFruit, Seeed, etc.) who produce open source hardware and release libraries for the community).

Not everyone can afford to buy non-clone hardware all the time, or possible not ever, but if you can, you are contributing to the health of the broad Arduino ecosystem so it's worth doing.

If not for Arduino, and the others, the cheap stuff wouldn't be cheap, it wouldn't even exist. Just consider that.

 

Hello everyone,
I'm an electronic engineering student and electronic/arduino/raspberry pi hobbyist and I'm looking to get into learning about using IOT with microcontrollers. Basically I was looking at getting the Arduino IOT Explore kit (https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-explore-iot-kit?variant=40788881834135). It looks really good and has excellent reviews. However, being a student, money is tight, and the kit is quite pricey. Nonetheless, I am willing to invest in my education and hobby. Does anyone know if this kit good/worth the price? Are there any alternatives?
Thank you very much,
Happy Christmas.
Sean.

School is expensive - buy what you need - work in the summers - attempt to get out debt free... it's the difference between having to work and freedom/nice vacations/a new car every few years/etc once you get out and start working.

Do you need this kit? If I was a new EE going into course work, I'd take a few classes and find out what I needed. You'll likely need some of these things in a few years, but you won't be wasting money in the meantime. It might be more useful to buy a reasonably good scope and logic analyzer, so you don't have to go to the school/lab to do your work. I know a lot of people that have used Analog Discoveries - again - wait until you know what you need... then buy.

Having said that - it's always nice to have some uC/uP kits around the house for various projects and continued learning.

 

i think for someone staring it is a great way to use a kit. it is all matter of time. kits allow you to test various things right away without waiting forever, and they tend to include working set of instructions, program examples etc. one of key features is that things fit easily together and you get variety of things to explore (something to be appreciated if you do not know what to look for).

btw, 100EUR for something that could be had for fraction of that price is just unreasonable. here is an example of various kits that can be ordered on Amazon for some $20
https://freenove.com/tutorial.html

nice thing is that detailed documentation is included so your can learn about something before buying.
once you find what you are interested in, you can of course make own versions or combine several of them into one unit - something that is more portable and suitable to commercialize.

 

i think for someone staring it is a great way to use a kit. it is all matter of time. kits allow you to test various things right away without waiting forever, and they tend to include working set of instructions, program examples etc. one of key features is that things fit easily together and you get variety of things to explore (something to be appreciated if you do not know what to look for).

btw, 100EUR for something that could be had for fraction of that price is just unreasonable. here is an example of various kits that can be ordered on Amazon for some $20
https://freenove.com/tutorial.html

nice thing is that detailed documentation is included so your can learn about something before buying.
once you find what you are interested in, you can of course make own versions or combine several of them into one unit - something that is more portable and suitable to commercialize.

During my first two years of engineering college any such kits would have been worthless and a distraction as well. Especially kits that provide no technical explanations at all. Until the fundamentals are mastered playing with programming is not productive. And using cookbook I/O is not a learning experience, it is only following a recipe.

 

learning IS following a recipe

 

learning IS following a recipe

USEFUL LEARNING is understanding WHY and how, not just following a set of instructions. Even learning to did a ditch safely requires gaining insight so as to avoid cave-ins. Learning to follow a recipe is OK as long as that is all that one would ever need to do. Actual engineering, creating original stuff, takes a lot more than just being able to follow a recipe. And poorly documented kits do not do that.

 

I'd have traded my expensive K&E Log Log Duplex Deci-Lon slide-rule in an instant for an Arduino and the technology behind it when I was in engineering school! Most people learn by doing and I do not think that anyone who has used an Arduino kit and followed the examples did not learn anything. And if you have no experience with the kits why do you think they are poorly documented? There have been thousands of books written on Arduino at many different levels of experience. Not to mention the millions of Arduinos sold!

EDIT: Just did a quick check. Over 10 million Arduinos made and more than 57 thousand different titles written. All the way from Juvenile to Engineering Specification! That also says something about their popularity and market share.

 

I'd have traded my expensive K&E Log Log Duplex Deci-Lon slide-rule in an instant for an Arduino and the technology behind it when I was in engineering school! Most people learn by doing and I do not think that anyone who has used an Arduino kit and followed the examples did not learn anything. And if you have no experience with the kits why do you think they are poorly documented? There have been thousands of books written on Arduino at many different levels of experience. Not to mention the millions of Arduinos sold!

EDIT: Just did a quick check. Over 10 million Arduinos made and more than 57 thousand different titles written. All the way from Juvenile to Engineering Specification! That also says something about their popularity and market share.

What was the poster looking for as far as documentation? In my experience, I’ve found a plethora of good documentation.

• Arduino forum
• Online Arduino Reference
• Open-Source hardware documentation
• Documentation for EVERY add-on board (shield) including:
  • Pin assignmentd
  • Addresses in use
  • Wiring diagrams
  • Sample code

And that’s off the top of my head.

 

The Arduino is a Development Board designed to take some of the headaches out of building all the peripherals to support the microprocessors and aid in communicating with it. You can go as deep into it engineering-wise as you wish. And all of that is documented. You don't have to build a watch to learn how to tell time is their approach.

 

USEFUL LEARNING is understanding WHY and how, not just following a set of instructions.

to each his own....

the way i look at things all learning is useful if it can be applied.

using kits does not mean leaving university or stop reading manuals or learning how things works.

it is about getting real world working example to PROVE that theory works. i view time as a precious resource. getting kit and making something that works in 1h and spending next 4 hours playing with it and tweaking it to own needs produces WAY MORE of very VALUABLE experiences than spending weeks or months of menial labor just to create something that most likely will not even work on first few attempts or at all. and failure is a big turnoff and demotivator. learning need to produce dopamine and should be built on successes. success is not to spending precious time of a busy engineering student to build own kit modules when something like that is already available off the shelf product for the price of coffee.

MisterBill2 to his son: "Son i am going to teach you how use command line to delete a file. First we are going to get shovels and buckets to go digging some soil. one day we may find minerals and ore needed to make wires, transistors, gates etc. by the time you are 70, you will know how to use command line on a computer that you built using only relays and needs Niagara falls to power it up. If you are lucky, you may meet some girl too and perhaps even get married.

Panic Mode to his son: "Hey want to see some ancient computers? Lets pick some old parts from the basement that i used to work with years ago, we can dust them off install and run DOOM, QUAKE or whatever you like. And after lunch we can do that on a raspberry Pie. Tomorrow i will teach you databases and how to collect data. We can order some ESP thingies from Amazon and make that data collection using sensors running Wifi or we can control relays through internet".

Both paths produce valuable experiences and positive learning outcome but 60s are long gone. There was some progress along the way and one need to experience and produce results much faster.

topic starter clearly stated that he is the electronic engineering student looking for something to get his hands on as additional extracurricular activity (not a substitute for lectures). that is already rare. most students don't care about practical aspect at all, and will gladly cheat on labs to get passing grade. they will do the theory, pass exams and try to find work with no hands on experience. i say life is short and use what you can.

 

OK, folks. Go and take a look at "Nuts and Volts" to see what I am talking about.
AND amazingly enough, there is a whole lot more to electronics that programming processors. Even the most advanced software skills will not help you design an interface circuit, although there are some handy design programs around, nor help with deciding howto package the system of electronic parts after it is created. So after you know how to understand the power needed to operate the system then being able to produce control code may be useful. And software skills will not help apply ohms law to circuit analysis.
Certainly a bunch of colorful criticisms and insults and exaggerations. So I must have stepped on a lot of toes. But really, there is a lot more to reality than embedded processors. No further comments from me on this topic.

 

Not everyone is destined to be a hard-core electronic design engineer. Electrical engineering and its subset of computer engineering runs a wide gamut of interests and abilities. Getting someone interested in electronics is a start down that path and I see no reason to start throwing up no trespassing signs and barring the path. I personally like to give them a nudge along the way to enlightenment. Even Nuts and Volts magazine wouldn't be in business if people were not interested in electronics, and it fills a niche the IEEE Spectrum does not, or it wouldn't still be publishing! Even though I have heard of Nuts and Volts Magazine, I've never owned or read an issue of it, but I sure would not try to dissuade those that do from gaining knowledge from it or belittle them for it. The analog to that is I would not dissuade anyone with an interest in electronics from pursuing that interest in whatever way that satisfies their need for learning. Nuff said...

 

OK, folks. Go and take a look at "Nuts and Volts" to see what I am talking about.

I mean no disrespect or scaring you off. If it helps, it was not me starting shouting, mentioning ditch and frowning on alternative views (just saying). Maybe this is an opportunity to see things from a different angle.

I recommend simply checking any Tutorial.pdf that is in each kit in link i shared. It does go well beyond "do this and it will work". There are hundreds of pages with clear illustrations, explanations how and why things work. This is in no way inferior to any article of Nuts and Volts (which is a great magazine).

About wasting time... well i confess that I have (and continue) to spend good deal of my time on things most other people cannot understand. Even by kids look at me in shock "you are actually doing math... in your free time... to check something already published many years ago?". Getting their attention is a challenge. Getting them to do something they perceive as above their abilities is a sure way for them to give up. I am just trying to motivate young ones and not scare them away.