Arduino boards are great to get started with electronics has they offer an ecosystem of expansion modules and libraries, as well as tutorials, that may it easy to get started with almost any projects.
Seeed Studio Grove is a family of standardized modules with 4-pin headers using digital I/O, analog I/O, UART or I2C interfaces and allowing you to easily connect to compatible board such as Seeeduino Lotus board. You still need to connect the Grove module via cables, so Seeed Studio decided to create a big board called Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino that features Seeduino Lotus at the center and ten pre-wired and detachable Grove modules so no cabling is required to get started apart from a USB cable.
List of Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino board and modules:
- Seeeduino Lotus ATmega320p board compatible with Arduino UNO compatible board and featuring 12 Grove connectors
- 10 pre-wired modules without the requirements for breadboard nor jumper cables
- Grove LED
- Grove Buzzer
- Grove OLED Display 0.96″
- Grove Button
- Grove Rotary Potentiometer
- Grove Light
- Grove Sound
- Grove Temperature & Humidity Sensor
- Grove Air Pressure Sensor
- Grove 3-Axis Accelerator
If you need even more modules, you could connect some of the 300 Grove modules to the headers on the Seeduino Lotus board making sure it does not interfere with already pre-wired modules.
Apart from the hardware, Seeed Studio also provides a very detailed Wiki equivalent to a 74-page user manual and including 12 step-by-step tutorials. The schematics are also available.
The kit ships in a nice package that explains the most common Arduino functions, and sells for $19.90 plus shipping. The first 1,000 orders will also get a free 4GB USB drive with supporting materials when using GFB4GB coupon
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I think Intel did a thing with their Edison Groove kit:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Grove-Indoor-Environment-Kit-for-Intel-Edison-p-2427.html
That blue rectangular thing on the temperature/humidity sensor module is the Chinese made DHT11 which is worse than useless, it lies to you in seemingly random ways, especially with the humidity output. The DHT22 sensor is better, only slightly more expensive, and is of the same form factor. The unanswered question of why they didn’t use the DHT22 instead of the lousy DHT11, is disturbing.