Smart Home Starter Kit

This Smart Home is not my first Keyestudio kit for the Arduino. It lives up to the same quality of my previous kits. I especially like how Keyestudio takes the basic Arduino board and improves upon it with things like USB C, special IIC pins , and extra IO connections. This kit is a little more convent than some, because everything is included. This means control boards, sensors, cables and wires. Oh wait, you do have to add six AA batteries. I got a pack of six at the Dollar Tree. This is a great kit for the person who is not only looking to learn the basics, but who also wants to create something with an immediate, practical application component (element). The kit allows the user to start with the simple programming of turning an LED on/off, and work up to using a phone app to control several environmental things around the home. The two controlling boards are really well made and offer a great opportunity to experiment with the Arduino even before you begin working with the Smart Home. Six AA batteries powers the whole house. This works fine, but I plan to try connecting a pair of 18650 lithium batteries at some point. The power connector on the control board will make this easy. If you are new to Arduino, take your time and go through all the beginning steps carefully. The library explanation is pretty good. The introductory projects help familiarize you with Arduino sensors. The wood house is definitely a fun touch. It goes together easily and is cooler than a plastic box of parts. It uses real metal hardware to attach many of the parts. The servo experiments are made extra interesting with the introduction of a special gear. I am thinking of adding solar cells, mounted on the roof later for more experimentation. All in all, a very satisfying and worthwhile kit for the Arduino enthusiast. There is plenty of opportunity for future experimentation. The Smart Home builds a capable foundation.

Great way to teach your future engineer (child or grandchild or anyone) basic electronics, especially the in the Uno world. Kit comes with just about everything you need to get them started. Well made and straightforward to use. My wife is stealing the moisture sensor set up to monitor her plants! We are very pleased.

I give 10 stars for the thought that went into the design. It is well thought out. It is complete and like how the sensors and actuators work together. The window sensor that senses rain and door that reacts to password are good examples of tying things together as a well planned system. I also give 5 stars for the step by step instruction rather than introducing the big blob of C code. The customer service is very responsive and has a 1-day turn around (Us/China timezone difference). Once you get a hang of the board, shield and sensors, motor/motor driver, there are endless possibilities to build projects. Why I am giving 4 stars: 1. The chipset should be compatible with Raspberry PI/Linux. CP2102 in my understanding is distributed with Linux/Raspberry PI but I am not sure why the instruction does not mention it. The support is not aware of this either. Hooking this up as a Pi Slave will open up more opportunities. 2. Please open source the code the App. It keeps crashing and Bluetooth connection is not stable. The messages are in Chinese and does not help debugging. 3. The revolving door does not attach cleanly and gets stuck during open/close of door. It does not clearly integrate with the mobile app. The window operation needs better directions. If you didn't understand C code you can easily get into a situation where the window motor keeps spinning with no room to open. 4. Nit pick: Slot 18 - what is that for?? Was it intended for the pot with soil sensor? Annoys me that there is a hole with no purpose :-)

The house itself was fun to build - took some trial and error because the instructions are on a giant wiki page and the pictures are a bit low quality, but once it was together it looked really neat! Unfortunately (and the reason for 3/5), the app crashes as soon as you grant it location access (apparently required) so I have no clue if what I built actually works or not. If the app gets fixed I'll happily update this review, but I've seen some other negative reviews on this and it looks like it's been a known issue for a while with no updates. I wish they'd open source the app and let the community fix it! ** UPDATE #1 ** The Android app is the one I was trying and it crashes, but on iOS everything pretty much works as expected and the app runs. Hopefully they patch whatever is broken on the Android version and I can update this again with good news!

We have built several of these houses, the goal was for students to understand smart lunar homes, electric circuits, and programming. Being used in a NASA HUNCH project. Kids projects in space who knew? Please reach out to us at NASA-VIPS ( Google Search )

I've messed with a lot of Arduino kits over the years, but this one has jumped to the top of my list. The instructions were great. Everything went through the first time. I REALLY like that they go through and teach you how the sensors work before they tell you to put the kit together. Then at the end you put it all together. I downloaded the android app. It took me a few mins to wrap my head around it, but you can open and close the doors and read sensor values and all sorts of cool stuff with it. The big wooden gears are also a nice touch. All the parts are laser engraved to make assembly a breeze. The house part took me an hour and 15 mins to do casually while watching youtube, but the manual has enough in it to keep you busy for a week.

There were may parts included that were not supposed to be in this kit, along with screws that were missing. The assembly instructions were online only and not well written at all. The sample code is pretty much useless so I had to write it all. They didn't even incorporate the bluetooth module in the sample code. Overall, it was a frustrating build for both me and my child.

My son needed a project for school and this fit the bill. So far he has like it and works more and more on it. Great way to learn.