Southpark:
Ebay is where I've purchased all of my arduino UNO clones. Have never had one fail on me yet, which is good. I have lots of these things, all purchased from different ebay sellers
Have bought Nano, Uno, Mega, Pro, and a number of shields since I started on maybe 5 years ago. Only one failure, a Uno a few weeks ago wouldn't work. Loopback test passed so the driver, USB connection, and 32u2 was working fine. Swapped '328p for a known good, still wouldn't work. Chip that was originally on the new Uno worked fine on a different board. Got refunded, still no idea what to do with the Uno board yet.
It is almost true that every part was purchased from a different supplier. I can't remember which suppliers in most cases.
The breadboards are from Maplin, which is not convenient or cheap if you do not live in the UK. You can get breadboards anywhere and there are many different designs. Get at least one large one to begin with, or two smaller ones. Save the link where you purchased them, because later you will need another one or two, and you will want to get the same type so that they can be clipped together,
The Wemos Mini was from Wemos.cc and purchased through AliExpress. But as I said before, I would not recommend the Wemos to a complete beginner. I would recommend a Nano for a beginner. It is very close to an Uno in most respects, but breadbaord compatible. I know not everyone agrees with me on this. Sometimes Nano can fail to be recognised by Windows, I am told. I never had this problem because I have been using Ubuntu for longer than I have been using Arduino, and I never had any problems.
azerino: @PaulBB, thank you so much. You said above "But shields and Arduino designed for use with shields also have disadvantages". I am a bit confused. Which one would you suggest then (with or without shield)?
As a beginner, I would like to have a board which is 100% compatible to Arduino IDE. If you think Micro, Nano, etc are advanced to me, is there a Uno with a shield that is 100% (or almost) compatible to the Arduino IDE.
The advantages of shield-type Arduinos surely outweigh the disadvantages by a wide country mile - particularly for a beginner. If you make a choice based on disadvantages, you need to have a firm idea of what they are. The only ones that are obvious are
you have a serious space problem.
you are particularly interested in WiFi, in which case the Node MCU is worthy of attention. This does not take shields and indeed is not even an Arduino, but it is usually the way to go with WiFi
There are no secret herbs and spices in the Arduino IDE, all Arduinos use it and all are kosher in the eyes of the IDE. There are even boards that make no pretense at being an Arduino that run fine on the Arduino IDE. A case in point is the abovementioned NodeMCU.
In the matter of LCDs, I submit you are far better off using an I2C display than a serial. It uses no more wires, it can share the wires it does use, and avoids any serial problems.
