SunFounder Raphael Kit

This was a great kit for my son to learn electronics and programming. Very high quality components and parts, easy to use, and the instructions are very good. Good. It does help if you have a little bit of starting knowledge to understand the instructions, but they'll get you there.

This is a great "handy man" or "experimenters" kit of components. Everything I needed to start building a cam to watch the charging light on my ear buds case, and shut off the power to them when it changed fromn charging to charged to save the battery like my new phone does. Great kit.

Hmm. This is a nice kit for learning....if you have a little bit of electronics experience already. I can't imagine if someone is a complete newbie to programming or electronics. I'm a professional programmer of 40 years, with about 4 years in an AIX (Linux, IBM style). Some of the installation instructions for libraries even confounded me. Some examples will not work if you do not install libraries; some libraries are "external source, your must...." yadda yadda, with no real explanation about the yadda's. Good luck to the newbie. Some of the steps for the wire hookups are minimalist, at best. Some of these, if hooked up badly, *can harm the Rasp-Pi." Can't harm you, being only 5V, but at about $100 for the Pi....not what I want to sizzle. Enough of the bad stuff?? Sure. This is a nice kit that covers a lot of ground, and shows how the circuits work and gives some very good experience learning. All instructions are online (which some people apparently do not like) and it is thorough for various programming languages. (I just wish more detail were given for setting up what is not simple.) It would a nice addition (SunFounder, if you're listening!) to have extended exercises for the builder to try. For instance, your 7 segment LED has a count up. 1) make a prog to count down; 2) make a prog to act like a clock--ie go to 59 seconds and roll over. Stuff like that.

I bought this kit a while ago and I have honestly spent so much time just learning and experimenting with it. It is packed with components, so there isn't just one way to use it, you can go in so many different directions depending on what you want to build. It has been amazing for my personal projects and there’s lots of support. The SunFounder website has A LOT of great resources, tutorials, and documentation that made getting started really easy. If you are looking to get into Raspberry Pi or just want a massive kit to tinker with, I would 100% recommend this.

I'm learning from Paul Mcwhorter's online courses on Youtube. SunFounder is sponsering one of his Raspberry Pi online courses and so I bought this kit to follow along. The kit is overall okay. It has all the components you'd need to follow along his course, apart from a Raspberry Pi board that you'd need to buy separately. Unlike an Elegoo starter kit that I bought when following his Arduino online course, which came with an Arduino UNO R3 board within the box. But you can't expect to get a Raspberry Pi 4 at this price tag, so it's okay. The only downside I find in this kit is the resistors' quality - they're of a very cheap brand, compared to the ones that come in the Elegoo kit. I didn't understand why I'm struggling with the ones from the SunFouder kit and why they feel too brittle, which got broken on me a few times when bending the legs to fit inside the breadboard - which you need to adjust from project to project - until I actually got the Elegoo's kit out from storage and compared them. As you can see from the pictures, the ones that come in the Elegoo kit have much thicker legs than the ones in the SunFounder kit. I'm not sure why SunFounder had decided to go with these cheap resistors for beginners. For the price tag of this kit, I think that resistors with thicker legs should been included, which are much more durable and conveninent to use when bending and inserting them into the breadboard. Besides the above downside, I didn't find anything else wrong with this kit and can still recommend it - just be gentle with these resistor legs.

The lessons it steps you through are pretty good, and you can always expand on them between lessons to learn a bit more. It is nice that the parts are there for completing the lessons. I'd recommend this as a good starter kit. I did purchase a few other things quite inexpensively to add some additional capabilities (e.g. another large display matrix), and another Pi Zero so I could keep one completed lesson project together and experiment more, rather than taking it all apart to start the next lesson, but that's optional.

I was surprised how much usefull stuff (electronic parts) are included.

Lots of devices to experiment with.

Very complete set, with all the components working as per spec (careful in handling the camera module though, as it is quite fragile). What is great is that the kit comes with access to SunFounder's website that contains all schematics, links to each component's data sheet, sample wirings along with the associated code in C, Python and Scratch. Even better, there is a YouTube playlist proposed by Paul McWhorter that includes 40+ tutorials helping absolute beginners build up their Raspberry / GPIO skills step by step, relying on the same SunFounder kit. These tutorials help to dig deeper and understand the theory and practice. The attached video is the result of one of Paul's recommended homeworks. Note: the green RAB board is from Makeronics.

I was really excited when the package arrived. But I realised that the kit was already used, with box of the kit opened already, bags inside of the box already opened with parts scattered around(resulting in them being bent). Every single one of the resistors are missing. Overall, really disappointed in the kit.

I am quite disappointed that the breadboard was falling apart; the camera module doesn't work (doesn't get detected by RPi4, whereas another camera works just fine on the same RPi4). Pins of many sensors were bent (not a deal breaker as I could straighten them out; however, worried that they may have been damaged in the process of straightening). Yet to use many of the sensors. Hopefully, they will function well.

This kit includes a lot of components - and is probably worth the price, but I wish the description made clear that you have to buy the Raspberry Pi separately and there are no written instructions at all, everything is online. Its sort of okay, but for the older folk (like myself) I prefer to learn reading the instructions and assumed there would be something on paper (or even the ability to download and print out yourself).