Whats in those "45 in one" sensor kits?

as i tend to do I’m starting off tonight with a beer this time it is… oh yeah uh capizzi capiche kabichi… I don’t do Italian I don’t know uh this is cappuccino milkshake stout it was brewed by vessel beer using the facilities of non-such brewing in Winnipeg and contains coffee from Fools And Horses coffee roasters in Winnipeg the artwork on the can is by Jesse Thiessen who is getting 10 cents from every can that’s sold. that’s kind of cool these guys to support a local artist oh man definitely stout definitely coffee that’s going to keep me awake which is good because this is going to be a lengthy video possibly back in the mailbag 96 i got this 45 in one modules set here it is sold as companion modules or expansion modules or experimenter modules for Arduino or Raspberry Pi I guess but mostly Arduino type stuff and there is a lot of them the first thing i can tell you about these is the way these ones were packaged which was the cheapest way possible of course because cheapest cheapestly possible is how i do things they were packaged just in a bag rather than being packaged in some kind of a rigid case like they often are so that might not be the best way to buy these you might want to if you have an option if you’re going to order one of these might want to get it in a hard case just so that it doesn’t come with components all mangled that’s quite a lot of stuff that you get in the set now then how useful are these for experimenting well um you could easily buy a lot of these things separately off the board but there’s a little bit of a bulk price savings now then how uh are they going to be extremely useful having like three or four different leds a couple of different read switches a couple of different variants on a microphone input i don’t know um they’re all slightly different operating modes and I’m gonna go through a bunch of them today so one thing I’m gonna have to stop and do for a bunch of these is just to straighten out the bent pins as i said if you buy these in a proper box rather than just a cheap bag like i did they’re less likely to come all damaged and bent but this isn’t all that difficult to fix anyway so this here is the breadboard power supply it can take various input voltages and convert them to either 5 volts or 3.3 volts and then it connects to a standard breadboard to put that power onto the breadboard you can see the pins down there just go on like that and those ones are bent just like that so now the negative output is connected to the negative rail the positive output is connected to the positive rail and the same down here that set of jumpers top and bottom here to select whether this set of rails is either 3.3 volts or 5 volts let’s put that one on 3.

3 volts we’ll leave this one on 5 volts now then um it is using 03:40 - linear regulators uh one triple sevens i believe they are yeah ams one triple seven one of them is a three point three volt version of the five volt version so to power it you just connect uh a voltage higher than five volts of this barrel jack here you can use you know wall work like that i’m just going to use this nine volt battery for now ah plug it in there power switch to turn it on there we go and it’s got a convenient 5 volt usb output there but more importantly it’s putting a voltage onto your breadboard so let’s connect something to that let’s get one of these output modules here perhaps this one this one appears to be an led um it’s got three leads on it so it’s probably a two color led okay so i’ll just connect this guy in right now i’m on the 3.3 volt side i’ve got ground connected to the first pin the one on that side and it will connect this to the second pin the positive voltage there’s one color and there’s the second color let’s try this led module this is an rgb led it’s a 50 50 is the package it’s a three color rgb led so this one’s marked it’s got negative on the right hand pin so there and the rest of them are marked as well so that should be blue red green so you can connect this well you can connect any of these because they seem to have the resistors built into them now you can connect any of these directly to the pins on an arduino that’s what they’re for you just use the breadboard jumper wires such as that to connect them to the pins of the arduino and control them in software now i’m not going to write up a bunch of software for each and every one of these things especially for the basic inputs and outputs but any digital output from the arduino can drive one of these things directly don’t drive all of them together because there’s a limited amount of current that you can put out of the arduino but for just basic indicators and whatnot there you go so here’s another rgb led from the pile it’s similar to the other one different package but same functions minus voltage red green and blue blue green red now this little board has two components on it it has an led and a mercury tilt switch there’s the uh just ground and led power and if you put the groundware on the switch lead then when you tilt it the little tilt switch turns that led on and off tilt switch is an old-school mercury tilt switch so when you tilt it watch a little blob of mercury it moves and it’s no longer making contact between two wires in there yes it is actually a little blob of mercury i’m not sure how they export those from china without getting caught but there it is it’s perfectly safe as long as you don’t break the glass thing and it’s a fairly solid little glass thing there is a mercury tilt switch just on its own that’s oh and it looks like it’s got a little led and a resistor on the board there let’s see what happens the switch and led combination are on the left terminal in the middle terminal tilting that it goes out that’s just a standard little push button switch i don’t think there’s much to explain about it these two are read switches which are a magnetic switch so here’s a read switch just from my collection a little bit bigger one as you can see it’s just a little glass tube with two pieces of uh metal in there and when a magnet gets close it closes the circuit these things are used a lot in burglar alarm and that kind of stuff so here is this little guy i’ve got plus and minus voltage uh connected up to it and the digital output i’ve just got going to that led over there you see when the magnet gets close the voltage uh the led goes on and that led goes on this one is the same thing just with the amplification it’s just a switch just like i showed you with my standalone switch next thing this little switch here looks like it’s got a spring in a tube which has been all skewed by the shipping you can see just at the top there there’s a little metal contact and then there’s this spring here and when it moves around that spring knocks into the metal contact to tell you if the thing has been jostled around this one appears to have beaten up pretty bad in shipping but that’s what that one does this is a different kind of a vibration sensor so this guy has a spring a coil spring wrapped around a solid little pin there and when he gets a whack it makes contact very very briefly as you can see on that led back there so little laser module just like so many of the others let’s hook up plus and minus voltage and then we have a little laser diode like any laser don’t stare straight into it but it’s not that powerful it’s not going to hurt you unless you burn your eyes out or something so just a little bit careful but they can be fun to play with and i’ve got a project that i did with these guys i’ll link it somewhere actually i’ll link down in the description to any project that i’ve done with any similar device like any of these they’re all kind of fun to play with though and this one is just a standard oh it’s not a standard blue led this is a multi-color flashing led okay self-flash led they call them that one’s the fast flash this one’s another dual color led red and green again common cathode the negative is the common the positive is the one that uh changes here so this little module calls itself a heartbeat sensor and it is uh basically an infrared emitter and an infrared receiver this one is not soldered together the way most the examples online that i’ve seen are they should be pointing kind of at each other and then you put your finger sort of in between them and the arduino is reading the analog output voltage from this thing and if we look at the serial plotter and if i hold my finger still you can sort of see it bumping up and down a little bit with my pulse you could easily do some math on on that and actually come up with a number for the pulse but not for this demonstration now let’s take a quick look at these uh style of boards they’ve all got some sort of an analog sensor on them and an amplifier and a little bit of amplification they’ve got a digital out and an analog out the digital out will uh trigger uh five volts or zero depending on whether this thing is active or not and that will turn that little led on that’s with a threshold crossing and then the analog output voltage depending on which sensor you’ve got will give you either an analog voltage or high enol on the analog again depending on which sensor there’s an led there which lights up when you’ve crossed your threshold and a power led so here’s the flame sensor wired up uh analog voltage over there digital output over there okay so this is one of the two microphones i’m not sure what the difference between the two of them is other than the physical size of the microphone and again you can adjust the threshold you can either have it as a digital or an analog hey one two i know one and mostly this is just for triggering uh things it’s not an actual microphone so a noise sensor really here’s the smaller of the two uh sound sensors with the microphone on it the only difference is the actual microphone it works exactly the same hey one two they’re not super sensitive but if you make enough noise right close to them they’ll trigger this board is one of the several temperature sensors in this kit this is an ntc thermistor it is a resistor whose value changes based on the temperature and again like all the similar boards it has a little threshold and whatnot but if we warm this up watch the analog voltage or the analog value changing and it’s just crossed its threshold you see the digital happen i let it cool off it should yeah it’s coming back up here and you can calibrate that if you choose to again for this demonstration i haven’t bothered to and they’re the thresholds crossed again so there’s another ntc thermistor in the kit this one’s just the thermistor itself with no other circuitry i’m just measuring resistance here now and if i warm it up with my fingers you see the resistance changing yeah same thing um you can use that just directly into the analog input or any other place that you need a variable resistance for for uh temperature next thing we have this one which looks like it’s got a transistor on there but really that is a hall effect sensor a hall effect sensor is a magnetic sensor so when the magnet comes close see this led comes on my digital output comes on over there and my analog voltage swings and again this i don’t know if this is yeah it is proportional see the analog voltage changing based on how close my magnet is and again you can set the threshold of the digital with uh with this i may have said earlier that this adjusts the gain of the analog but i don’t think it does i’m pretty confident that this adjusts mostly the threshold and the last of this style of sensor board is this one which calls itself a touch sensor again it has what looks like a transistor at the front but this time it looks like a transistor because it actually is the base input is folded up over there and it’s set up in a fairly high gain configuration so that when you touch that base lead that’s what triggers it nothing super complicated but it could be handy there’s other ways of doing a touch switch but this is a very simple way of doing it next then we have this little really module now a relay basically allows you to use a small voltage to control a much higher voltage and or current in this case we have the relay being controlled by a small transistor down here that one right there and that allows you to use a negligible amount of current such as you can get from a microcontroller’s uh digital output pin to drive the relay because the relay coil draws a little bit more power than you want to be pulling out of a arduino pin so we have plus and minus voltage coming straight from the power supply and then we have our signal line which would be coming from the microcontroller if i chose to hook one up and that activates the relay here is the common pin in the middle normally closed there’s no signal on it that’s this one when i put the signal on that goes away and now the normally open is closed because it’s not normal anymore it’s energized got it good next we have the two little buzzers one is called an active buzzer that’s this one here one is called the passive buzzer that’s this one the passive buzzer is essentially oh it is exactly a speaker that’s all it is so you have to put a signal into it um a waveform of some kind for it to make noise the active buzzer you just have to give a voltage and it’s quite loud when it doesn’t have the sticker on it this little guy here is a tilt switch there’s a little ball with a metal ball inside there and when it rolls around it makes contact i mentioned this quickly in the beginning but this is a variable resistor a light dependent resistor ldr something called cds cell which is cadmium sulfide cell which is the chemistry of it but that doesn’t matter so much it’s a resistor who changes based on the amount of light coming on it that’s resistance over there make it dark make it really dark what’s that yeah and then put it in the light it goes down to 300 and some ohms so these two are two different hall effect sensors um this one here is the same one that’s on this board however it’s just all by itself and you connect it up like so many of these things negative positive and the signal output and its output changes based on this magnet being close to it you notice when i flip the magnet over this polarity of the magnet sends the voltage low when it gets close and i flip the magnet again and this polarity causes its voltage to go higher than it’s neutral so that’s kind of interesting can tell you uh which polarity your magnet is and if it’s close or not meanwhile this other hall effect sensor coming from one side it lights up if you flip the magnet around though and come in from that side it doesn’t but then with that magnet still flipped you come in from this side actually now you flip it around its original orientation you’re coming from this side it senses so it can sense from both sides but only one polarity of the magnet and the board’s got a little resistant led on it too so that’s slightly different and its voltage doesn’t vary it just snaps on and off whereas that first one we saw it had a variable voltage next in randomly pulled from the pile we have this little joystick module i think i’ve showed you this joysticks before but anyway this one’s got two potentiometers one for horizontal one for vertical or xy as you prefer and it’s got a little switch here so when you click down the button the switch activates and just like any other variable resistor its resistance changes when you move it so i’m in the y right now so there we go this rotary encoder is an interesting thing it looks like a potentiometer but it isn’t it’s not a variable resistor it is two little switches set a certain set of degrees apart and as you turn it one or the other or both or neither are activated onto the output i’ve got an entire video about these things that i’ll put a link to rather than going into uh too much detail and spending too much time on it right now it is a handy little thing though oh yeah and it’s got a little cookie switch on it too this is sometimes called a raindrop sensor or a water sensor it basically has a transistor there and a couple resistors and then these tracks etched into the circuit board ah even on the back it calls it a water sensor okay so when this thing sees a drop of liquid on there its output voltage goes up and the amount of liquid on there will have an effect on what the output voltage is if there’s not very much on there it’s a lower output voltage in a similar vein there is this which is a soil moisture sensor you jab those spikes down into the dirt of your plant pot or your garden or whatever and it will give you an analog value coming out to give you a relative indication of how moisture soil is again i’ve got a full video on this and another type of soil moisture sensor which i will link you to so that i don’t have to spend a whole bunch of time uh making this thing work tonight this one is an infrared receiver typically used with remote controls i’ve got it hooked up to my uno here and i’ve got a demo sketch from the ir receive a library i’ve just got a random infrared remote control it doesn’t come with one but i’m going to push a few buttons and we’ll see what happens so there you can see the arduino is decoding and displaying the data based on those buttons so you just take that information those hex codes and put that into your sketch to control whatever it is that you want to do this module is the dht11 temperature and humidity sensor the pinouts on it are slightly different than the rest of them ground is on the right powers in the middle power’s almost always in the middle and the signal’s over here and this one is labeled minus is over there and signals over there so i’ve got my arduino connected here let’s pop up the serial monitor and there it is it’s reading 29 degrees celsius and 49 humidity which is humidity is close but the temperature might be a bit high these aren’t the most accurate uh temperature since in the world but they’re not bad for a rough idea and just generally getting a trend i’m using something very similar in my uh beer fridge monitoring project that i did a while ago which also uses something very similar to this one the sd card reader i the one that i use is microsd card but it’s very very similar so the sd card reader again there’s a library um so many of these things there are libraries available through the arduino ide this one uses mozzie miso chip select and serial clock to talk to the arduino it can be either 3.3 or 5 volts but then you can either read from this or you can write to this and use it as a data logger which is how i’ve used it but you can also read configuration and what not off here if you choose to write a program that that needs a whole bunch of data read in or something like that but data logging is what most people use these things for next we have three different optical proximity sensors this particular one is the beam brake sensor so if something come goes in the slot there and breaks the beam then you see the output little blue led back there this one is one of the two different reflective mode sensors there’s an infrared led and an infrared sensor here side by side with a little piece of plastic in between them so they can’t see each other very well you have a threshold adjustment when your object gets close this led on on here goes on and your output goes low um the output is connected to the middle pin this one’s handily labeled not all of them are there you go you can tell something’s getting too close and again i’m i’ve got some old videos on my model railroad using something very similar to this to detect the position of trains and this is the other infrared uh detect air proximity detector you can see it activating when this passes through here these two pots are basically for sensitivity they’re not labeled so just fiddle around with them now this particular one it calls itself an ir-08h and it’s relatively common you can find them online but every single one that i can find online uses a 555 chip on it this particular one uses a 74 hc-00 so i’m not quite sure what the difference is but it still works the same you can still get an output when it detects something in front of it ultrasonic distance sensor again this one i’m not going to hook up because i’ve got an entire video on it which is linked below but essentially it just uses sound waves to tell you the distance that an object is from it and it will give you a distance in meters or feet depending on how you do your math very handy a lot of robot projects use this so that it knows how close it is to a wall or something like that basically it just sends an ultrasonic sound out this speaker and times how long it takes to echo back into the receiver we’re getting into the fancier modules now even though this one doesn’t look like it this one just looks like a normal little transistor but really it is a one wire temperature sensor one wire because it both transmits and receives on a single wire and there are ways of configuring it so it can also get power off that same wire so you only need ground and one wire although in this case i am using uh two wires just because it’s easier for this module i’ve got it hooked up to my demo arduino here and we’ll just see what happens when we hook it up using of course a demo sketch from the library and there it is reading from the temperature sensor um 26 27 degrees if i put my fingers on it to warm it up a little bit you see it’s starting to climb up again nice little temperature sensor and these ones will run on a fairly long uh cable away from the device so if you want to uh extend your temperature monitoring a fair distance away from here do you know this is one option so this one is a real-time clock module based on the 1302 chip there’s a few different real-time clock modules but this is one of the most common and least expensive ones and it only has three components it’s got the chip itself it has a crystal oscillator or a crystal that acts as its oscillator as its reference and it has a battery holder nothing on the back so if we put a battery in there it will remember its time when the thing’s unplugged or disconnected i’ve got a demo sketch loaded up plug the arduino in and and here we go it is showing the current time on there 1106 which matches what my computer’s time is because that’s what happens with this particular demo sketch it sets if the time’s not already set on the thing it sets the time for it but now they’ve got a battery in there i’m going to disconnect the power to the arduino for a while and i’ll come back and we’ll see what it says why we’re letting that clock just tick away with no power on it and actually you notice there’s no power lights on the arduino so we’ll just let that go for a while let’s take a look at uh this little buck converter a dc to dc converter that came with it it’s just very simple you connect your voltage to the in and your whatever you want to power to the out this one will take a higher voltage and reduce it to a lower voltage so right now i’ve got about nine volts coming into it and its output is eight point something volts but there’s this little adjustment potentiometer right here so you can set it down to under one volt or whatever voltage you want it’s a little bit twitchy to adjust it’s not the highest quality potentiometer but once you’ve got it where you want it it’ll stay there and you can use that to power your projects off a voltage other than the voltage that projects like to have and the last module in the set is this little gyroscope module on the back it calls itself an mpu6050 on the front that calls it a gy521 regardless it can sense its horizontal and vertical and position whether it’s tilted one way or the other it can sense acceleration in three dimensions i believe it can sense rotation as well so i’ve loaded up a demo sketch that i found into good old arduino this one only needs four wires it needs power and it needs uh the i2c uh so seo and sda so right now i’ve got it sitting upright or flat i guess i’ll tilt it onto its side there i’ll roll it this way i’ll bring it back upright again neat little thing i have to play with that more one of these days as usual i got this kit on ebay um there’s a reasonable search term if you want to find something like it they’re not that expensive i mean 21 dollars that’s less almost half a dollar per module that’s not too bad if you want to uh bulk out your experimenter kit quickly there’s also the uh baby brother to it the 37 in one kit a lot of these come packaged a little bit nicer than the uh than the bag that i got it in and it’s almost all the same modules there’s only a few different ones between most of the kits and most of these have exactly the same modules in them matter of fact i went through the uh the common 3701 kits and the 4501 kit that i got and everything that’s in the 3701 kits is in this 45 in one kit slightly different names maybe but they’re all there but here are the ones that the 4501 kit has that the others don’t the real-time clock module the water level module aka the raindrop module the soil moisture module the ultrasonic sensor the breadboard power supply which comes in handy the gyroscope which is a neat little one the buck power converter and the st card reader module so those are basically the difference between the 3701 kits and the 4501 kits so there we go there’s just a brief introduction to 55 different modules that you can use and experiment with your with your arduinos or your projects now mo all of these are available individually of course um most of these types of things are available just as a stand-alone item not on the board but these boards make it really easy to plug into jumper wearers and just try them out so a lot of these same modules come with a lot of starter kits i haven’t seen a starter kit that’s got all of these modules but most of them have some assortment of these so if you’ve already got an arduino starter kit this may or may not uh be interesting to you if you’ve got a small arduino starter kit because again some of them come with just just the arduino and a couple of breadboards and a few small things this might be right up your alley to expand what you’ve already got i don’t know anyway there it is this is more aimed at beginners just to give you sort of an overview of what comes in one of these kits in case you’re curious i hope you enjoyed that thanks for watching comments and questions down below as usual in the comments section i’ll talk to you later .