I went for the starter kit from Earthshine Design because, to be honest, I had no idea what kind of components I would be needing to get started – or even what to build!

The Earthshine kit comes with a nice PDF manual with step by step instructions to build a number of projects with the components supplied.

With that said – let’s get it out of the box

The arduino itself. Oooh shiny.

Enough LEDs to light my entire house

And enough resistors for each of them

And… the rest of the components – many of which I don’t yet understand exactly what they do. Includes a motor, potentiometer, temperature sensor, switches, transistors and so on.

The kit also includes a USB cable to connect the arduino to your computer, a breadboard and jumper wires for easy prototyping (without going to the trouble of soldering etc) and a power adaptor to power the arduino when it’s not plugged in to a computer.

And that’s not to mention the cool case to store your components in!

The kit costs £49.99, which from the research I did, seems to be a good price for such a starter set. With so many components supplied and tutorials for projects to build with them, it’s going to keep me busy for a while.

Kit available from http://www.earthshinedesign.co.uk/