Electrons: Cheap Parts Pack KIT from eBay

And what value resistor should I use for a LED and 3.3v?

I explained in Electrons: LEDs, and connecting them to the Trinket that I had bought a cheap set of components from eBay so I thought I would just do a quick post about that as I will refer to it in a few other posts as well.

The eBay listing was succinctly entitled: Electronic Parts Pack KIT for ARDUINO component Resistors Switch Button. The kit itself was 1.59 plus 99p p&p. You got quite a selection of components for that.

There were four different colours of LEDs (red, yellow, green and white); 210 resistors - in seven values; two sets of 40x header pins; six push switches - and ironically 15 button caps to put on these switches; and four rotary potentiometers, aka variable resistors, two 10k ones and two 100k ones. These fit in the breadboard - which will also be useful.

Overall its a pretty good pack - but the switch button tops are of little use - I would rather have had some knobs for the potentiometers and fixing nuts - and maybe a few capacitors instead. Also its a pity that the switches don’t fit in the breadboard easily

The kit works out at approximately 1p per component - so not bad value if you look at it like that.

Here are the LEDs from the kit hooked up against 3.3v from the yuRobot USB power supply. Notice I added a resistor for every single LED. I fiddled with the values a little until I found one which made the LEDs bright - so for 3.3v a 10 Ohm resistor seemed to be the best - although with the ultra bright white LEDs the others look dimmer.

I’ll use one of the potentiometers in my next post.

30-Dec-2014 Add comment