Getting Started with Arduino/Iot-Buyer's Guide

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As mentioned in the previous articles, Arduino board is a great way to start rapid prototyping and application development. Similarly, ESP8266 is a great standalone chip or a standalone development board to step into the IoT world.

Arduino & Assosciated Components: For starting with Arduino, a basic arduino Uno board and a USB cable to plug the arduino to the PC will be required. However, i don't recommend buying only arduino as you will be very limited with the applications you can develop or the experiments that you can do. Many online sites sell basic Arduino Starter Kits. These kits in my opinion are worth the purchase to start developing applications. You can check one such kit here. You can also go ahead and search on other sites like Flipkart, ebay etc. Such kits contain various components and pieces like Breadboard, Connecting Wires(M-M,M-F,F-F), Resistors, Capacitors, LED's, Motors, Relays, Switches etc other than the basic Arduino Uno board and its USB cable. Alternately, you can take these kits as reference and buy the components individually. In addition to this, later on you can buy sensors like temperature sensor, IR sensor, Ultrasonic sensor etc. Some important concepts that you must have from the beginning itself are :

  • Arduino UNO board and it's cable
  • Breadboard
  • Connecting wires of different variety
  • Resistors
  • LED's
  • Switches
Arduino & Components

Rest of the components can be bought later also depending on the requirement. But still, getting a decently priced kit with as many components as possible is generally a good deal.

For IoT: Obviously, the components mentioned above have to be there so your IoT project can be useful and have proper application and utility. As mentioned in the ESP8266 post, for Wi-Fi capability, ESP8266 chip or ESP8266 development board needs to be purchased. The links for both are given below:

Note: There is another good site that I found recently for purchasing components. You can find the Arduino Learning kit on this site. You can also explore the site for various other components at reasonable price.

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