For my recent Arduino class, I bought a couple of inexpensive, Chinese-made, Arduino starter kits off Amazon. They included an Arduino Uno clone, a breadboard board, some components, and some jumper wires.
Overall, they were a pretty good deal for less than $18. Unfortunately, the breadboard was kind of poor quality. One of the students had a real time getting one of the experiements to work, and after quite a bit of troubleshooting, we determined that the jumper wires were just not making good contact with the breadboard.
After the class, I wrote up a review on Amazon:
” Lacks sensors, breadboard quality poorI just bought a couple of these for a class I was teaching. These were very inexpensive, but I was kind disappointed. First of all, the quality of the breadboard seeemed to be very poor. One of the students had problems getting his experiments to work because the components and wires didn’t make good connections. Also, I would have liked to have a temperature sensor and maybe a motor, so we could have done those experiments in class. I’ll be buying a more complete kit next time and maybe trying a different vendor as well.”.
Yesterday, I got the following email from the vendor:
Thank you for taking time to leave your review and letting us know the problem. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this situation has caused you to this point. We’ve already designed a new breadboard which is much better then before. Would you like to have a try?
Please don’t feel unhappy, we will try our best to help you solve all of your problems.Looking forward to your kind reply. Please give us a chance to make things right for you.Panda
Elegoo Support Team
I am going to give them a chance to make it right. I’ve replied, asking them to send one of their new breadboards. I’ll try it out and let you know.
Dave New, N8SBE says
I doubt that they redesigned the breadboard, as much as they just found a different supplier, and figured they could appease you and get the bad review updated.
I had a somewhat similar experience with poorly designed merchandise from an Amazon seller. You may recall that I discovered my battery was bad in my laptop a couple of ARROW meetings ago. It failed in less than a year, which was the warranty period.
This is the 3rd or 4th battery I’ve had to replace in this almost 10-yr old laptop, and my experience with previous brand-name Duracell batteries was not much better, although they were quite a bit more expensive. So, I went to Amazon, and left a ‘failed battery’ review with 2-stars. I got a notification via Amazon that the seller wanted to contact me, and after a bit of back and forth, they agreed to replace the battery if I sent them the defective one. They were VERY anxious for me to update the bad review. It left me feeling that they were much more concerned about the bad review than in fixing my problem.
I just received the new battery, and it seems to work, but the proof will be in the pudding, as they say. I updated the review to 4-star, but noted that I’d be back to change it again if the new battery failed within the warranty period.
Dan KB6NU says
Possibly, but they didn’t say anything at all about updating my review.
Steve ~ W8SFC says
Hey I could use the contact information for Panda. If they really can fix all your problems I want to sign up. :)
Steve ~ W8SFC