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DimeArduino.com.au - Arduino Starter Kits from $14 and Boards from $4.99

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DimeArduino.com.au - Arduino Starter Kits from $14 and Boards from $4.99
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AssociatedLDime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 11:25 dimearduino.com.au (2180 clicks)
Last edited 05/11/2016 - 12:05
OZBARGAIN20161101

Hi, I'm Jeremy from Dime Arduino,

DimeArduino is a new store set up because I was tired of seeing my friends get ripped off on Arduino gear. Yes, we are a drop shipper, we don't hold stock or have a store front. The difference between us and the next 27 sites is that I only set this store up because I realised my friends were paying $30 for $5 boards and $10 for $4 component packs. I can't beat Banggood's prices on everything, but it seems like I've managed to price fairly competitively with them on some products.

We stock Arduino bit and bobs, with a focus on Starter Kits, which include a board and enough goodies to get started and Booster Boxes, which don't include a board, but have enough additional bits and bobs for a project or five.

If you're not quite sure what Arduino is and does, take a look at my An Arduino Journey page. The name is pretty lame, but hopefully it helps you understand a little better.
store

I've set up a discount code "OZBARGAIN20161101" for OzBargain customers. It'll give a 20% discount to the first 100 orders over $20 (limit: 1 per email address). Here's a few of my favourite products:

  • Robot Car Kit - When I was home from work for weeks with kidney stones, I stumbled across a robot car kit I'd ordered from China a few months before. Now I have an Arduino sotre. Ahh, memories :)

  • Mini Uno Starter Kit - Currently our cheapest Starter Kit. This $14 kit gets you an Arduino compatible board, a breadboard, LEDs, jumper cables, resistors, a USB cable, a battery clip and some header pins

  • Deluxe Uno Starter Kit - For a little more than the price of a single bare board at some of my competitors, you can get an amazing kit loaded with toys. This kit includes an Uno, RFID antenna, LEDs, resistors, jumper cables, a pot, a buzzer, a shift register chip, sensors and LED displays and more!

  • Transformers - Some soldering required!

I'm also working on building up a list of basics. Right now, this include my Soldering and Components categories. Let me know if there's anything I should add!

  • Soldering - Includes solder, solder suckers etc…

  • Components - This will expand as I find common components at decent prices. I try to only include things I use, so it'll grow over time. I was worried about my component pricing… until I saw Banggood's!

As I mentioned, we just opened, so I'm happy to hear feedback. Especially bad prices, let me know if you can find it on a simillar site significantly cheaper and I'll either find a new supplier or drop the product. I obviously can't compete with the Chinese supplier prices, but I'm curating a store and hopefully adding some value.
Long-term plans include flesing out the tutorials page and adding an example for every sensor I can track one down for. I own most of the sensors I sell (and I'm happy to buy the rest as I have time!), so if I can't track one down, I'll make one.
Hopefully some of you find this exciting. If not, good lesson for me :D Oh, and be sure to check out Our Philosophy for my deal.

Standard warnings:

  • We do out best to stock only good value products. We won't stock it if it doesn't work, no matter how cheap it is. We won't stock it if it's stupidly expensive for what it is, even if it works.
  • I try to avoid anything which plugs in to mains power. I do this because I usually don't buy mains transformers from cheap sites, so I don't intend to sell them either. This is less a safety issue (never had one with a cheap wall adapter thankfully!) and more because they tend to start buzzing quite loudly pretty quickly.
  • Orders may be sent in multiple shipments, and may take up to 60 days to arrive. We do this to keep the cost down. I know that most bargainers already know this, but in the interest of transparency: if you're interested in how this works, it's called 'drop shipping', and there's heaps of info out there on the googles.
  • You're not buying European name brand electronics, you're buying Chinese stuff. While we will replace or refund any DOA or not-as-described products and conform to all Aussie consumer law happily, we probably won't replace a power supply because you think it has too much ripple, even though it powers your project just fine. It was $2.50, not $150.

Inside baseball: We use Shopify as out store front. Our payment options are PayPal or the shopify payment gateway. I'm still not 100% sure how I'm going to manage the effect of exchange rates on all my pricing, so for now I'm becoming a forex watcher!

Well, that's me, I hope you like my store. If you don't please consider leaving some feedback which might help me improve it.

A serious note: Buying genuine, brand name Arduino boards at $30+ a pop helps support the community which creates and maintains the Arduino ecosphere. If the store is successful, I'll be looking for ways of contibuting directly to the community and supporting new and intersting projects (not just on Kickstarter, lol).

Thanks for your time,
Jeremy.

Electrical & Electronics Arduino Electronics Kit Robot

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closed Comments

      • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 17:31
        +2

        errr, s/gome/come
        I kant tyep tiwdey

  • Captain M on 02/11/2016 - 17:42
    +1

    Great to see a local arduino store. I will definitely be buying.

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 18:03

      Thanks, but I should say, we're not so local. We're local in that I'm sitting in a room in Melbourne writing this. But, your stuff ships from China and will take a while to arrive. I think it's worth it, but I thought I should mention.

  • zero23 on 02/11/2016 - 17:49
    +1

    i'm an electrical engineering student and wanted to make a digital clock over the summer. would there be any kits you'd recommend i should get and would the deluxe car kit be hard to create? thanks in advance to anyone that can help :)

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 18:01
      +1

      If you're happy to dig out a tutorial for each of the boards and follow along, then you shouldn't have any problem building any beginner Arduino project you come across which doesn't involve audio, graphics or comms (network, board to board). The sensors tend to work really intuitively because they're usually based on simple physical principles (distance sensors, temperature sensors), or they have circuitry to translate a signal back to a voltage. When you get to the IR remote, there are so great tutorials on how to use them. It may take you a bit of time to work it into the system you've built, but it's not too challenging.

      https://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/IR-RemoteControl
      https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ir-communication
      http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Infrared-Remote-tuto…

      By the time you're using an IR remote control, you've probably started using Timers and Interrupts to help manage what you do when.

      If this is the first Arduino compatible kit you're building, then I'd start with modest goals and build up. Put the chassis together, put the motors, wheel, caster, driver and Uno on. Make it go forwards for 1 second, pause, go back for 1 second, repeat. Then add the distance sensor. Make it go forward till it's 20 cm from a wall then stop. So, you build it up, bit by bit and you learn as you go along. By the time you get to IR communication, it all makes a little more sense because you've gotten used to thinking about how toasters communicate. When I say toaster, I mean any really low profile device like a controller.

      All of that said, there's another level to building any sensor-based project which no one will tell you about. Sensors lie. Ultrasonic sensors give ghost signals, other distance sensors can be afffected by lighting and the surface they're bouncing off. Learning how to filter raw sensor input has actually been one of the fun parts for me. Anyway, goes to show that when you're operating at the level of components, not systems, things are hairier by nature.

      Hope that helps illustrate that a kit like this is a journey. Once you get good at hunting down the tutorials (and I'll be adding them to the pages over the next days and weeks), it's just a matter of thinking up new things to do with it :)

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 03/11/2016 - 00:32
      +1

      I updated the robot car kit pages with some tutorials. Take a look at them, and maybe mess around with Circuits.io, that should give you a rough idea of what you're in for.

  • OzzyBuyer on 02/11/2016 - 18:03

    Just bought a $13.99 Kit! waiting for it to come now

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 18:03

      Awesome, I hope you enjoy it :)

  • yippy on 02/11/2016 - 19:03

    Just bought a bunch of components and stuff. Cheers.

    Do you send another email when the items ship? because I got a shipment on the way email almost instantly.

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 19:24

      Short answer: Yes. And sorry about that instant email. Working on it.

      Long answer: Yeah, I noticed that. It sets it to "shipped" in my admin page too, it's really annoying, I have to use tags to track everything. I'll get an update when it ships and I'll hit the "resend shipping email" when I do. I know that's not brilliant, but I need to dig out the box I checked by accident which auto-sets everything to shipped. That's inside baseball for tonight, thanks for watching.

      Update: Setting changed, thanks for the prod.

  • rohit77777 on 02/11/2016 - 19:25

    At school we are building a line tracking robot with these

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 19:29
      +1

      The first robot I built was in first year electrical engineering. It was a line following robot with a ping pong ball as a chassis. I wish I'd known this stuff existed when I was a kid!

      • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 19:30
        +1

        Disclaimer: I was awful at electrical engineering, please don't take that as a reason to trust me!!!!! Seriously.

  • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 19:37
    +1

    This will probably end up buried in the comments, but here are some free things on the internet I use which are cool. Not paid promotion, but these two things blew my mind hole when I found them.

    • Falstad's Circuit Simulator: - When I saw the LRC example, a lot of things clicked into place. It's a good free circuit simulator. There's one I use for android, but it's not cheap, so I won't drop it in here. If you've got a cheap one, let us know!
    • Circuits.io - A less detailed electronics simulator - but it has Arduino boards in it. Here's an example. Click on the "Code" button to… well… see the code. Again, happy to hear about better ones.
  • axlfan on 02/11/2016 - 21:16

    Wow this is fantastic mate. I have been eyeing Arduino for some time.

    I am a Technical Architect working with a cloud platform called Salesforce. Technically could build something cool like use your mobile device to use API's to control an Arduino board to help you switch on a light for example. I want to build something like this.

    Any ideas around what I could buy for this? Basically using the Arduino board for IoT.

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 21:30

      Arduino Salesforce Integration…. Wow, I had honestly never considered it. My first build would be one of the wifi enabled boards and a servo to ring a bell every time you make a sale. That would be AWESOME! He says, as he realises he could totally do that.

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 21:31

      My first job was in a factory. They had LED displays with scrolling stats for each of the machines. Machine speed, downtime etc. Could you build a stock-ticker like thing using the data flowing into Salesforce?

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 02/11/2016 - 21:33

      Honestly though, I'd go a raspberry pi for what you're talking about. API integration is not something I want to do in c with a couple of kb of memory. It's doable, I just don't want to be the one doing it :D

      A cheap alternative to the Raspberry Pi is the Orange Pi. It's awful in a few ways, but it works and it's cheeeeeeap.

  • Blitzfx on 02/11/2016 - 22:34

    Don't you sell the touch screen separately?
    Kind of after the Leonardo + screen rather than uno + screen kit

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 03/11/2016 - 00:23

      Fair call, it slipped through the cracks. I'll put it up soon. Thanks :)

  • iMark on 03/11/2016 - 00:06

    Hey, awesome website / niche you've decided to work in, was thinking of starting my own drop shipping store too but I want to wait until I find the right niche that fits my hobbies (don't wanna be selling stuff i personally wouldn't buy lol)

    Here are a few things I'd like to bring up:
    1. Love your straightforwardness/honesty in letting us know you dropship, helps put a trust able face behind the guy running the website and hence i trust that if anything were to go wrong then you would be able to help us.

    1. I love your philosophy behind this all, https://www.dimearduino.com.au/pages/our-philosophy , was a great read, what I liked the most is this little bit you said at the end: " I find cheap stuff for you to buy. It ships from China to you to keep it cheap. You may receive multiple deliveries. If you want to strike it out on your own and order straight from China, please do, let us know if you find any great deals. I try to select reliable stuff, but we're ok with replacing duds." Awesome man

    2. You sell solder but no soldiering iron, I recommend you include tools that we would need to use in the future to work with these boards and on projects,maybe you could even make a bundle e.g solider + iron for a set price etc..

    3. I see you've made some tutorials on how to use some of the kits you sell, nice work and keep them coming, I understand they aren't a high priority but they do help so maybe you could work on them in some random free time (e.g if you feel a little bored and want something to do), for example I would love a tutorial on how to build the robot using your robot kit, ofcourse the programming for the robot is all very generic and you could link your readers to somewhere else but the actual step by step setup would be awesome. Make sure you include links to the tutorial page, philosophy page etc all over your site in somewhere visible so people see the site not just as a storefront but also as a community of tech savy aussies :)

    Overall great work, let me know how it all works out for you in the end, I plan to buy the deluxe robot kit, just need to know how to properly set it up etc, i am sure its something I can figure out after searching online for a bit. Love how your site lowers the entry barrier for those interested in this sort of technology.Best of luck with your site :)

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 03/11/2016 - 00:31

      Thanks a lot for your comments, they're much appreciated. The only reason I don't have soldering irons is that I don't know enough about electrical safety to know that they wouldn't be deathtraps. That said, I use a Chinese soldering iron (YiHUA 902A) which I really really like. For now though, my rule is "nothing that plugs in to the wall". Check out a guy on youtube called BigClive, you'll see what I mean.

      On the tutorials. Yes. After delivering good products to customers and forcing the price down for decent electronics, putting good, understandable tutorials out there is my goal. I haven't had enough time to do much more than the "blink an external LED" tutorial yet, but as the shop gets sorted out I'll have some of that random time to work on them. I've also got an graphic of an H bridge done, so watch out for that.

      In the meantime, there's some great stuff already out there, so I've added some tutorial links to the kit pages. I can hunt down 10 tutorials from around the net in the time it takes me to think of a title, so although it'll be a bit disjointed, it'll provide a nice intro.

  • ilikecheapcrap on 03/11/2016 - 01:52

    Wandering if anyone is aware of any good "beginner electronics hobby courses" preferably in a classroom (vic) where all these goodies would come in useful.. I have been a coder in the past, however my electronics knowledge is a tad shocking.. and im sick of just updating/using my raspberry pi as media centre, or connecting 1 led and thinking ive mastered the universe :)

    • [Deactivated] on 03/11/2016 - 04:49

      give it 10 years before anything like this will show up in your local tafe

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 03/11/2016 - 12:55
      +1

      Yep, I wish there was too. Fortunately, we have YouTube. Check out "AddOhms" for some good ones to start with. I'll be working on the tutorials page on the DimeArduino site over the coming weeks, it's not as good as real classroom learning, but it works.

  • mr626 on 03/11/2016 - 11:26

    Thanks for the post OP, and all the best with your business. I ordered a couple of the starter kits as presents for some friends, should make a good gift.

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 03/11/2016 - 12:53

      Great, hope you and they enjoy. Glad I could help :)

  • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 03/11/2016 - 15:21

    My apologies for the instant "shipped" emails that went out. I'm going through and clicking the "resend shipping email" as I get notifications. Any you get from now are are actual shipping notifications :)

    • yippy on 03/11/2016 - 16:20

      Hi, just got a shipping email. In the items in this shipment section it's got all the items I've ordered, does this mean it will come in the one package or will it be in a few separate packages? cheers.

      • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 05/11/2016 - 12:02

        It'll probably come in a few separate packages. I send the shipping confirmation when all products have been shipped, just so you don't get 20 emails if you order products from 20 different suppliers. The suppliers usually ship within 24-48 hours of each other, and given the delivery times I didn't think 1-2 days was critical. Sound sane?

  • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 05/11/2016 - 12:10

    Just a note to explain an edit that could look nefarious. I've removed the prices from the post because some of them have changed. I didn't realise how volatile supplier pricing would be. Some product prices have changed 20%+ in the past 2 days. I don't know what their pricing strategies are, but they appear to involve a lot of random noise! Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I'm not just price gouging, and I'm nto trying to hide my prices, I just need to get better at adding lines like "prices correct at time of posting" or "we change our prices when our suppliers do" might be more understandable.

    J

    • 7hours 44min ago on 07/11/2016 - 08:24

      If it wasn't for 11/11 sales coming I would think you were making a suss move. Most Chinese stores are increasing prices now getting ready to drop on the 11th.

      • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 07/11/2016 - 16:58

        Yeah, I suspected that's what it was. You'd think that would just put an even bigger hole in this week's sales than announcing your discount pricing a week early was already going to.

        • maurice on 13/11/2016 - 14:52

          Any new specials on for the sales?

        • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 14/11/2016 - 11:51

          @maurice: Honestly, I've been shoring up the business side of things for the past week or so. I've added some soldering kits. They're not just soldering practice, mot of them contain an interesting circuit like a multivibrator or an NE555 timer circuit.

          Just for you, I've set up a discount code :D You can get 5% off the soldering kits using the code "ILIKESOLDER" (limited to 20 orders).

          Practice Kits

          I'll have a wider one once I've got my accounting and paypal stuff sorted!

          Thanks for the interst,

          DimeArduino :D

        • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 15/11/2016 - 01:01

          @maurice: That said, I set most of the prices to auto adjust, so I guess we had specials of a sort as the supplier price came back down :)

  • MojoMiwo on 22/11/2016 - 16:43

    I just had 2 packages delivered and I can say they were the WORST packaging I have ever had.

    1- The components were crammed into a cardboard box with no space and no padding. 1/4 of the modules from the Deluxe kit had pins and commponents bent. I haven't tested them but if the packaging represents the quality control I would guess that some are damaged.

    2- There are no sheet describing the individual components or with the car kit no assembly instructions. It makes those Chinese 1 sheet instructions look good.

    Verry disappointing. I'm going to stick with Banggood

    • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 22/11/2016 - 16:46

      Thanks for the feedback. I've found a new supplier for the Deluxe Module Booster Box item, and it now comes in a plastic box. It'll be a little more expensive, but it seems like it's worth it. I've shot you a discount code to make up for it (hopefully).

      If anyone else has had the same issue, please let me and the thread know. Especially if it was on a product other than the Deluxe Module Box, which has been addressed.

      Thanks for the feedback, sorry for the issues.

      Dime Arduino.

      • yippy on 22/11/2016 - 18:46

        I've had 12 packages delivered so far and they've all been fine in the padded envelopes. They were mostly components so pretty hard to damage them apart from a bent pin here and there, still waiting on the last 3 items to show up. Been happy with the service so far.

        • AssociatedDime Arduino @ Dime Arduino on 22/11/2016 - 18:47

          Great to hear, thanks for the feedback.

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