37 sensor kit from Sunfounder lab

So, I saw this kit on Amazon.  It seemed too good too be true.  The kit was priced right, it was less than 2 dollars for each board.  Of course many of the boards are not sensors, some of the 37 are emitters of various frequencies of light and sound.

The package arrived in just a few days.  It was small enough to have been left by my mail carrier in my mail box.  I opened the medium sized padded envelope  and pulled out a nice plastic case that firmly latched shut.  Opening the case revealed the 37 modules each in little plastic bags.  None of them were labelled and there was no documentation.  Each module seemed to be well made and I didn't see any badly soldiered joints. 

Freshly unpacked.

Everything came mounted on tiny boards.  These easily plugged into a breadboard and I was able to connect several different modules to an Arduino board.   I sorted the various modules 2 or three into a single small bag.  I used the picture from the Amazon web page to identify each item.  This got rid of more than half the bags and organized the modules by function.

The list of modules from Amazon:

1.Passive Buzzer Module
2.common-cathode RED&GREEN LED Module
3.Knock sensor module
4.Shock-switch sensor Module
5.Photo resistor sensor Module
6.Push button Module
7.tilt-switch Module
8.RGB LED Module
9.infrared-transmit Module
10.RGB LED Module
11.hydrargyrum-switch sensor Module
12.two-color commoncathode LED Module
13.Active buzzer Module
14.Analog-temperature sensor Module
15.Colorful Auto-flash Module
16.Magnet-ring sensor Module
17.Hall sensor Module
18.Infrared-receive sensor Module
19.Analogy-Hall sensor Module
20.Magic-ring Module
21.Rotate-encode Module
22.Light break sensor Module
23.Finger-Pulse sensor Module
24.Magnetic spring Module
25.Obstacle avoidance sensor Module
26.Tracking sensor Module
27.Microphone sensor Module
28.Laser-transmit Module
29.Relay Module
30.18b20 temperature sensor Module
31.Digital-Temperature sensor Module
32.Linear-Hall Sensor Module
33.Flame sensor Module
34.High-sensitive voice sensor Module
35.Humidity sensor Module
36.Joystick PS2 Module
37.touch sensor Module


There was also a download link that had more information about how to use the various modules. 

The download is kind of a mess.  The manual reads like it was machine translated from another language.  I need to work on cleaning this up and uploading it to github so that people can just drop in the library and have examples for all the modules, and modules that show how to wire everything up.

It was also not clear to me how to wire these modules up to an Arduino board.

Oh look, it is a DHT11 !  Ignore the G N D V, that is just gibberish.

Looking down from the top, brown wire is ground, red is 3.3-5v power, and orange is signal.

Conclusion

Overall the hardware is nice.  Everything I have spent the time figuring out I have been able to get working.  Many of these boards would be several dollars individually by themselves.  The humidity sensor itself is 5 or 6 dollars if bought by itself.  IR receiver's are $2 as a bare component.  Having the bare component mounted on small boards makes it much easier to breadboard up examples, and the components are much tougher mounted in the modules than they would be otherwise.  Especially for me, since as I get older my hands get more and more apelike.

The only possible thing that one might consider bad is that many of these boards are near duplicates... there are 4 modules that sense temperature, 3 hall effect modules, a couple RGB lights, and so on. A little less duplication and a little more variety might be good.  But this might also be seen by some as a good thing.  Maybe you want to explore how variations on these components all work. 

Unfortunately, if you are currently looking for something you can just buy and get working in a day, you must look elsewhere.  The sole negative, but it is a giant negative, is that the Arduino sketches and instructions on how to wire up these modules is fairly difficult to do.  I've been spending a couple of hours getting each sensor to work in an evening.  I like doing this, so no big deal to me, but this might be a deal breaker for someone else.

Another thing that would be nice would be to throw in a few 3 wire, 4 wire, and one 5 wire female to male connectors so that you can easily wire the components right up to the pins on an Arduino board.  I bought this wiring kit for the variety of wiring options it gave me for Arduino, breadboard, and Raspi.