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The other day my friend called me up. He told me how much he missed building circuits and wanted to start again with the Arduino.

So he asked me “which Arduino starter kit is the best to buy?” At which point, I drew a long breath. Easy question, not always an easy answer.

Picking out an electronics kit depends on a number of factors. You should consider:

  1. Your budget
  2. What you already have
  3. What you want to do

#1 and #2 are probably pretty easy to figure out. For many beginners, it’s “not much” and “nothing.” When you don’t know #3, what you want to do, then it gets trickier. Coming back to my friend, what did I do? Well, I went out and bought each one of the kits in this post. I put myself in his shoes and maybe these are your shoes as well.

Assuming you have about $100 to spend, have no components on-hand now and just want to “get started” consider one of these 4 Arduino starter kits.

It isn’t always clear what is meant by calling a device or a signal “analog” and “digital”.  This AddOhms tutorial explains the difference between analog and digital by using an analogy to clocks.  Old-school clocks with hands are a great example of “analog” while alarm clocks with digits as their display are an excellent example of “digital”.

The next stage of the reflow oven project is moving to a custom PCB for the controller electronics.  Overall the board is based on the ATmega32u4 with a DS3231 RTC.  The LCD module is intended to be driven by one of Adafruit’s Serial backpacks.  There is an area of LED indicators (something I learned from a previous project) and some extra VCC/GND pins sprinkled about.