A short year and three months after Nd suggested to me that I should� acquire� an arduino, mine arrived yesterday.
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/
Cool! This actually looks better than the starter kit I got which has annoying ridged wires, no motor, etc.
This certainly seems like one of the better ones, everything included actually has a purpose and example things to build with it
Pretty intriguing and useful content. Saved to fav …
Thanks for the excellent read.
Sounds like you had a good deal with your starter kit ! I also followed this article that companes some of the best starter kits out there: https://www.atrakeur.com/blog/diy/quel-kit-arduino-pour-debuter/ (in french, sorry guys)
Well done and congrats on your first Aruduino. I am not sure if you are aware but some Chinese wholesale websites sale arduino like knockoffs for dirt cheap and after using them for the last 3 months, I must say I am quite impressed. The value for money is really good.