Hello everybody, I was wondering which starter kit or board to start with, an Elegoo Uno r3 or an Arduino Uno r3 or 4. I'm a beginner, and I bought a kit by Sunfounder about half a year ago. The board seemed to be dead (opened a forum on it), so now I'm ordering a new one. I checked out the Arduino Uno r4 WIFI and I liked it, but I realized it was a lengthy delivery time, so I found Elegoo UNO's super started kit, which claims to be compatible with Arduino. It also has a wide range of other electronics. I'm uncertain on this, whether I should go for the Elegoo or Arduino, because I don't want to be stuck with a bad board again but I don't want to wait for the lengthy delivery and not get as many things with the kit. I was also confused about how the Elegoo connects to IDE and the online software. Are Arduino and Elegoo partners? (I'm in the USA fyi)
I bought the Elegoo kit and everything works fine. Arduino circuits are open source and they are offered by many manufacturers at various prices. I am vey satisfied with the Elegoo.
The UNO R4 is a newer version and actually comes in two different flavors. Look at the Arduino site for descriptions. I would go with the R3 for learning. Then when you want to use WI-FI yo can consider the R4 or some other board. There are many.
I've gifted the Elegoo UNO's starter kit a few times to teen-agers around me and they work well.
The Uno is well known and tons of library are available so plenty of forum members can provide support and hints as well.
The R4 is more recent and more capable. Could be a step up after you've come to master what's in the kit and want to address larger projects possibly using Wi-Fi.
It's a dumb kit, in my opinion, and I wouldn't buy it or recommend it.
Uno are designed to have a shield plugged on top of them, and this kit contains a shield with a very small breadboard mounted on it. Only very small circuits can be built on such a small breadboard. I doubt all the circuits from the tutorials will fit on it.
The kit also contains a much larger and more useful breadboard. But that breadboard won't fit onto the shield and the Uno won't connect directly to the larger breadboard.
Obviously the Uno can be connected to the larger breadboard with an untidy, fragile and unreliable rats nest of Dupont wires. As soon as you do that it will become clear that the Uno was not the right choice of Arduino for the kit.
A Nano, for example, would be a far superior choice because it will plug directly into that large breadboard. A circuit built this way will be much more neat, robust, and easy to fault-find on, especially if you use solid-core wires cut to length and laid flat on the breadboard. This method will give you a much better chance of successfully building working circuits.
So I would look for a kit that includes a Nano or similar, and instead of that breadboard shield, perhaps a second, larger-size breadboard so you can build more complex circuits of your own design once you have completed the circuits in the tutorials.
hum - all opinons are valid and yes what you say makes sense but that's not what's out there in general.
To me such kit fits what most beginners wants to do and it matches the Arduino Starter Kit Multi-language — Arduino Official Store which comes with an even smaller breadboard.
With the Nano you don't have the opportunity to stack shields at all. I've seen beginners (after the initial phase) using shields for specific high level features (ethernet shied, motor shield, TFT shield, ...) I've never seen beginners play with shields for electronic wiring, they do so with jumper wire and a breadboard.
So having the UNO is a base platform for leaning and then adding shields "easily".
Given the price of Nanos, of course it does not hurt to buy a couple of them on the side.
(and debugging loose wires is a good learning oppotunity 
)
@J-M-L A bit confused what's a shield?
Arduino, being the noble project that it is, wanted regular folks to be able to interact with the world using electronics. So much so, that they made their platform all open source, meaning anyone could copy their design and sell it for profit. That's what Elegoo did.
Full disclosure: I own the Elegoo starter kit and an Elegoo Uno and a Mega. They work fine (mostly), exactly the same as a Genuino Uno R3/Mega.
I recommend if you're a beginner, to buy at least one genuine Arduino. Show them a little respect for what they enabled regular Janes and Joes to be able to do. That's just my personal sense of integrity talking. I'm well aware that the higher price point may be out of some folks' reach, but if it's no stress, do Arduino a solid. (I don't work for them, btw).
Now, the Elegoo kit is pretty good. You get a lot of stuff in the box and their code examples don't suck.
What does suck is their Dupont wires. Pure garbage: too short and the pins are too skinny to kit nicely in breadboards and such. Funnily enough, Elegoo sells a solution! Their Dupont wire box is much better.
Elegoo's little power board module sucks. It's wimpy af, lots of folks seem to report project breaking problems with it. So buy a few buck converters to easily dial in voltages lower than some power source.
The Elegoo set is good if you want to try a bunch of different sensors just because. If you don't really care about experimenting with all sorts of sensors, then maybe not.
You can try out all that stuff for free here:
(that happens to be the project that comes up first if I Google "Wokwi Arduino".
it's Arduino's word for something you stack on top of the board to add features
here is for example an ethernet shield
or a motor shield
or a CNC shield
or a TFT-LCD shield
you get the idea
sometimes you can stack more than one
Neat
My kit has arrived! (Elegoo super starter kit)
Have fun
Remember - double check all wires before powering the circuit and never work on the circuit with your power on !
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